Rocks of all sizes overtake you and rush past, energized by the molten heat sizzling from underfoot.

[ Cut sideways to zip around a steam vent ] —

Now you’re sprinting perpendicular to the slope. A wide halo of ash surrounds the high volcano crater, where you started. But the ash falls upward — suspended and drifting slowly, as though inside a snowglobe.

The mountain rumbles different pitches all at once. Whooping cries sound above the din: a chaos of ocean birds in the air, slick blue-green feathers reflecting shards of sun through muted sky.

You suspect the pyramid of trying to set a tempo.

A figure in the distance appears, approaching fast, running straight at you.

// Side B //

Thanks for tuning in! The track you heard is an oldie ~ bits of studio improv from 2016, St. Patricks Day, titled “off to the races”.

It’s been months of accelerating change, we just whooshed past the 3-year anniversary of Campfire Sparks, and there’s 0 sign of let-up.

Thank you for your readership + listenership + fantasticnessship 🍀 I’ve got a story for you today and it’s 100% true.

A wild experience I’ve never had before

Two months ago in Berlin, I portaled into another dimension.

It’s just past midnight, and I’m sitting at my desk at home, lamps dimmed.

I press play on a recorded meditation that I’d tried for the first time a few days before. A voice guides me through ten minutes of breath-holds coordinated with squeezing the body’s lower muscle groups, with the intention of accelerating the spinal fluid’s natural upward flow — into the brain.

5 or 10 minutes after doing the breathing exercises, I feel a sunburst of energy lighting up my mind. The voice has moved on to other ideas, but I am now traveling at high speed through a tunnel of blues and purples. It is visual and visceral and I am shocked.

Instinct tells me to stay on top of the wave, for it to continue.

Over the next — what feels like two hours, but is only thirty minutes — I surf a boundary space, between deep emotions of universal love and the obstacles that block me from its immensity . . . versus a background awareness of sitting by myself somewhere in the physical world. I’m laughing, crying from joy and sadness alternating or combined, tears streaming out from closed eyes.

I let motor functions slacken, so I’m freely drooling too — just making a righteous mess — but the intensity of the emotional roller-coaster pulls me fully through. I awaken to my love for family and friends and even random acquaintances around me, and for myself, the last of which hits me like a bomb.

At one point a glow of light suffuses my field of vision, then brightly envelopes the whole thing, which I can’t explain because it’s the middle of the night and I’m alone.

Afterwards . . .

I return, from somewhere — and it ends up taking a few hours to come down.

First I walk to the bathroom to clean up. When I catch myself in the mirror, I’m stunned. I see the most beautiful smile on my own face, one I’ve never witnessed.

Then I sit at the piano and, still riding the intensity of the journey, begin to play from a space completely untouched by assessment. That experience, also, is unlike anything I’ve ever felt.

A funny thing happens the next morning.

I go across town to record a solo-piano session. The producer picks me up at the train station, and on the car ride to the studio he tells me about the latest ayahuasca retreat he went to — usually he attends two ceremonies per year. During his stories the hairs on the back of my neck start tingling, because I realize that I just went to a similar place, only without substances.

A psychedelic trip, with no psychedelics.

There was also a curious detail on the night of, at journey’s end.

Longtime readers might have picked up on my obsession with recording. It started with piano workshop time, then expanded to writing, and photography to some extent. Most recently I’ve been walking for an hour each morning, dictating into voice memos, could be brain dumps or problem-solving or some “dear diary” mode.

I enjoy the routine of feeling ushered by motion, and brisk air, into the studio, where I jot on paper whatever was revealed or discovered while outside, over a cup of fresh coffee.

When I disembarked from the meditation, I felt so full of awe and wonder that I felt an impulse to record my voice — so I did. I spoke all my thoughts and described what just happened and how life couldn’t ever be the same again, now that I knew, with my entire body, the truth.

What eternity feels like.

I started the voice memos app while talking, while stepping into the bathroom and greeting new-me reflected in the mirror. Then, since seeing my doppelgänger was two new flabbergasts, at least, I fetched my Nikon to record video, too.

Later on, when finally feeling tranquil enough again, right before heading to bed, I fetched the camera to watch the video.

There was no video.

Strange. I opened my phone to look for the voice memo.

There was no voice recording, either.

I’ve been enchanted by this spot since my first visit to Berlin. It’s the way crowds gather, ice creams and byobs from spätis to knapsacks into little group jubilees of social merriment, decorated by rotating street musicians, sunset, ruffled silvery blue hour lighting up cobblestones and reflecting off the bottle caps wedged between them.

I lived in town when coronavirus lockdowns were lifted, and will always remember how it felt to encounter, after months of isolation, hundreds of people packed on Admiralbrücke, each with their own music playing out of portable speakers, unified in our joy to be alive.

Here’s video #2. Thank you to old friends and new who came through — take it to the bridge! — including our friends in costume (see happy ending) ~

🏴‍☠️ The show always goes on: here’s two more clips from a second set after night’s descent. Together with the astonishing Scott Hildebrand on vocals and guitar, performing an unreleased song of his:

And #4, featuring Derif on guitar to close out the evening:

Full concert program:

Set 1, 42 minutes

00:00 Singya (Ali Farka Touré) -> Impro 1
08:40 Impro 2 // 7/8 melodic travel music
12:55 Impro 3 // cross-rhythms/periods, evolving chords
20:28 Single Petal of a Rose (Duke Ellington)
22:52 Impro 4 // jazz ballad/stride
24:50 Impro 5 // pulse + melodies + counter-pulse
33:02 Impro 6 // blues, shuffle
37:47 Impro 7 // samba

Set 2, 60 minutes1

00:00 Impro 8 // piano + guitar
01:22 Impro 9 // piano + guitar + harmonica
03:36 I Found Love (Scott Hildebrand) // guitar + piano (uncut)
07:16 Impro 10 // piano finger-plucking + guitar
(cut) A Foggy Dew (traditional)
08:30 Wild Mountain Thyme (Francis McPeake) // guitar + piano
10:18 Impro 11 // piano + guitar ballad
12:45 Impro 12 // piano N. African polyrhythms + guitar percussion

Long recordings of these with better + stereo audio, plus soundcheck, can be streamed and downloaded pronto —

they’re at the top of the Campfire Sparks secret vault — at least until we pile more jewelry onto the stash . . .

Read more

The rock — a deep, rich maroon — includes an elegant arch curving from east to west, further inviting wonder by appearing not only impossibly smooth, but also as if the entire affair is one single piece.

What must have taken millennia for wind and water to carve is now the extraordinary shape of a graceful slipper, beach for heel and cave for toes. It is a somewhat gloomy gracefulness, however, due to the wispy drape of fog blocking your view of anything up beyond the foot strap.

The slippery stone makes climbing up impossible . . . and you lack the equipment to scale it.

[ Fly up into the fog ] —

The fog parts effortlessly, embracing your ascent.

An overcast, blank canvas, the uniform shade of solitude, surrounds you in every imaginable direction.

You are aware of extreme cold but do not really feel it; does the world, when it can be neither seen nor touched, still exist?

~ do you?

// Side B //

Thanks for tuning in! You witnessed an improvisation snippet from last weekend, and a photo taken in Australia’s Blue Mountains from February.

I considered scoring today’s story with “The Wild Forest Reigns”, off my 2021 solo-piano EP, Lullabies of the Pleiades. Here’s the song,

and a photo from the release • promo • triptych,

. . . but in the end I chose the more oblique soundtrack.

Dear listener, what do you think: do you prefer a direct hit when combining stuff —e.g. fiction + music, blazer + trousers, picture + text — or would you rather a bit of dialogue, friction, rebellion? If I admit I adore Magritte and wear different socks on each foot, you already know my coordinates.

What music and/or sounds would you pick to score Slipper Beach?

Postcard from West Morocco

This week I’m writing to you from the outskirts of West Morocco, near Essaouira. It’s my first time in the country and everything is exciting, from the braying donkeys to the fresh-ground almond butter to the 18th-century medina’s souk markets overflowing with rugs instruments spices jewelry and particularly popular escargot stalls.

Interactions with locals have all brimmed with heart and genuine curiosity, and I can’t get enough of the traditional music (lots of Gnaoua) popping up everywhere at sunset, like lanterns lit upon the city’s high terraces, flaring into the night, favoring daily life as festivity.

10 Apparitions, 2 Weeks

Clippings of stuff crossing my path recently . . . some music, some ideas:

1. A brisk walk generates more ideas than a leisurely one, if I’m dictating thoughts into a voice recorder.

2. I love the new album Sou Kora from Ballaké Sissoko (kora) / Vincent Segal (cello) / Emile Parisien (sax) / Vincent Peirani (accordion), especially “Amir” and their thrilling arrangement of Aldo Romano’s “Il Cammino”:

3. “Rule of life: Never make asks of someone bigger than you. Give until they offer.” Alex Hormozi

4. Love Nikita Diakur’s animations. Mesmerized by “Doorway”:

5. You’ll always get my attention with heterodoxy against 99% of common practice among trained professionals in the field of their expertise. This is why I harp1 about piano improv’s being accessible to everyone including 100-year-olds — and why you should join the mailing list for my Piano Liberation Workshop, whose next cohort launches soon!
   
   Oops, veered off-road. Seymour Bernstein + Ben Laude + Logan Skelton correct the record on what hairpin notation means in 19th-century music scores:

6. “We overvalue people we don’t know and undervalue those we do.” Brian Norgard

7. Killer ambient work by Hiroshi Yoshimura on Surround, originally released in 1982 and now re-issued:

8. Count Basie and His Orchestra appear so exquisitely in this episode of Blazing Saddles that I eagerly await their surprise arrival to my current desert surroundings, too. Who chose “April in Paris” — was it Basie?

9. “haha” and “hehe” go back, at least as far as the 11th century.

   

10. Posted this one in substack notes but I find it so captivating, here it is in book context from 1911 too. Ramesses II at Abu Simbel, carved in the 18th century BC. The scales of physical immensity and time gulf are both impossible for me to grasp.

    

One last evening fog meditation, before we part ~

What are you excited about lately?

See you in a couple weeks — unless you write first.

🧋

Ok, if you have met a ghost, or if you have a ghost story, I would love to hear it.

A wise person once said, Every love story is a ghost story.
The reverse is perhaps even truer: Every ghost story is a love story.

Otherwise, there wouldn’t be ghosts at all.

I have another question for you: have you ever wondered if you might one day, mysteriously, appear somewhere else in the world?

Well I’m here to tell you: it finally happened.

You wake up in a field of grass.

The sun shines on you but, somehow, you don’t feel warmed by it.

When you stand up, your body feels not your own. You know how to walk, but your legs feel strange. And when you touch your face, the shapes seem unfamiliar.

You look across a patch of flowers and see a stone house nearby, a wooden bridge, a stream slowly moving.

You hear people laughing and talking, but you can’t make out their words.

Smoke drifts over from an unseen fire, making gray curly wisps that carry to you the sweet smell of grilled corn.

[Walk toward the voices] —

You notice the linen clothes you’re wearing, but they feel not your own, and the way they brush up against your body feels unnatural.

As you approach . . . you see a group of people now, there are ten or twelve, women and men and children gathered.

You want to wave to them but they haven’t noticed you yet.

And when you walk closer, still no one turns to look.

Instead of walking along the riverbank next to them, you step into the circle of the crowd — now you’re standing at their fire pit.

Vegetables bubble in a giant brass pot.

Suddenly, you realize: none of the adults are talking anymore, and the children are staring at their feet.

You wonder if you are having a strange effect on them — because you seem like an outsider?

You walk up to the water, to check your reflection.

// Side B //

Thank you for tuning in to Campfire Sparks.

Today’s story hails from the Travel Poems live show, one of several that I speak aloud while members of the band improvise as the tale unfolds. For this one, usually it’s the acoustic bass, but sometimes it’s been vibraphones or frame drum.

The 1st song above was Oak Island, released on Chapter 2 . The night sea in 20221.

And the video was “Day 73 // an island emerges from the sea” from last year’s Proof of Play series — chronicling what I worked on each day, scored to a photo I took “on that day” from a previous year. The music was excerpted from practice time also in 2022, September 4th.

Comin’ right up: backstage stories, the current routine, and gifts for paid subs.

A Tale of Three Gigs

1 — Trio plus one-hundred

Three weeks ago, I’m an hour outside Paris
in a chill village called La Ferté-sous-Jouarre —
it’s the middle of June and we’re approaching a heatwave.

A 3-day jazz festival is afoot.

(Earth, Wind & Fire is the headliner, how perfect for “the festival of two rivers” — finally, the element they’ve been missing this whole time! anyways)

I’m there as Josephine Pia Wild’s pianist; we’re opening the festival.

Picture me, Josephine on handpan and voice, Guillaume on bass, and 100 French kids aged 8–12.

The children have been learning JPW’s songs throughout the year — not just singing but also dancing to them, speaking their own poetry over them, and playing orchestral arrangements of them.

It’s a marvel how they know the music inside-out.

As a kid I joined the Phoenix Boys Choir, which may’ve set me up early for the magic of children’s voices in ensemble — who’s untouched by Charlie Brown or The Sound of Music? — but nothing could have prepared me for how it felt to perform with these kids.

Rehearsal’s already beyond endearing, since the kids have started to wave to me, pull faces, shenanigans . . .

Then: one of the most beautiful shows I’ve ever played ~

2 — Duo

Next morning in the same town, bright and early.

Josephine and I play another show, this time just the two of us.

Festival organizers shuttle us to a new location. It’s a retirement home.

Indoors, clean, clinical. There’s a tiny elevated stage in front of a black velvet curtain, and an electric piano — one of those with its own pillars and power cable — which two nurses carry across the room and lift onto the stage, now 1/3 occupied by the piano.

The audience awaits, already in full attendance. We set up our own mics and cables, and they’re watching us do it, dishing commentary on what’s going on. One eighty-year-old woman says I look good.

They’re sitting in armchairs and wicker chairs and wheelchairs. Blankets. Half of them asleep.

Josephine’s face and name are projected onto the wall next to us, big as a movie screen, in case anyone forgets during the show.

We soundcheck for a minute then start immediately.

Quips from the peanut gallery continue as we play, even increase. Juxtaposed with respectful applause between songs.

There was one other time I played an old folks’ home — my first jazz group in California, bass and piano, called The Astronomer and Spaceman. Based on that representative sample size, I know that every retirement home comes with a talkative contingent.

Today it’s two women in the front row.

My french is beginner-level, but the comments seem critical. During one song I catch someone saying trop fort (too loud).

Mid-set, Josephine asks the audience if the sound level is ok. The non-sleeping crowd says yes, except for one dissenter. A woman raises her hands in front of her chest and makes a “T” — the universal sign for “it’s time to stop”.

3 — Solo

Days later I’m in Berlin for Fête de la Musique: longest day of the year.

Last autumn I started touring Radio Flyer, setting up the tea lounge around town, announcing where I’ll be via community text (you can join too!)

But this summer there’s a greater purpose beyond “playing outdoors”.

I’m making the next album in full public view.

My obsession with open-studio formats continue growing. For The Tributary it makes more sense than the recording-studio process: I can workshop relentlessly, live and for video, refine ideas and structures for improvisation, and truly give the music away (more on that later).

So. Load up the trolley with piano and collapsible tea lounge, wheel it from my house to Berlin’s island of museums.

It’s Fête day which means music EVERYWHERE — far more than I anticipated.

The spot I’d hoped to score is plastered in wall-to-wall techno music.

Contrast this 69-key piano: quiet, acoustic, one string for each note.

I’m looking for crowds and a good vibe away from car traffic, but wherever people are hanging out there’s cacophony.

Lots of people gathered on courtyards in front of the Dom Cathedral. But it’s packed with two choirs, a brass ensemble, an Egyptian saxophonist blowing on backing tracks from a rolly amp, a guitar quartet perched at the base of Altes Museum, solo trumpet, and a too-loud-for-convo 20-foot-tall water fountain splashing merrily.

As I walk in circles trying to find a calmer spot by ear, I begin to lose faith.

I tell myself I’m determined to play somewhere . . . when the fountain shuts off and the saxophonist starts packing up.

I walk up to Ahmed El Saidi and chat a bit, ask if I can take over. No problem. You can still hear all the music groups mentioned earlier, but it’s much better.

I set up on the grass lawn and play one of the most eventful outdoor shows I can remember.

It’s a striking experience, vibing the percussive grooves of West African folk rhythms while starling murmurations swirl above cathedral spires.

Interspersed with jazz standards and originals, here’s the concert program, given away as postcards at the merch stand.

Crazy bugs start swarming at crepuscule. Cockchafer don’t sting unless trapped — but what’s in a name? They’re as big as cherries, attracted by music, landing on my head, arms, even my face, hovering like helicopters and buzzing just as loud.

I continue as a dozen bugs crawl all over me, crashing around like bumper cars, drunk with glee.

The voice of Matthew McConaughey appears in my head. I’d recently heard his story about being summoned to Mali by a dream, and I recommend the whole interview. In concert, Ali Farka Touré doesn’t shoo away the “village hermaphrodite” climbing on top of him, even when it disrupts his ability to reach his guitar strings. You play the song that’s happening — indeed, as it has never been played before.

Gradually, sunset seeps into twilight, and I press on through midnight, feeling the undulations of wind and crowd presence . . . eventually, the music calls for softer voicings, the relief of darkness, night songs.

—

These 3 shows felt bundled together in a care package, as if through them I could witness the seasons of life. Spring, winter, the rainbows between, in glowing moonlit relief, a clarion request for attendance to all these moments I have been gifted.

( Thank you to Beata and Lacy for this video at a subsequent show <3 )

A Creator’s Schedule (2025 Edition)

It’s taken years for me to understand that artist life works better when approached with the similar constraints of a 9–5 job.

And more years to experience it, embodied, bit by bit one at a time, each lego piece maneuvered painstakingly into place as though by mechanical tower crane.

The revisions will continue until morale improves. Here’s the current schedule — if you’re curious about details such as journal prompts, scribble a post-it reply to this entry. I’d also love to hear how you approach this stuff, why to steal your ideas of course.

8a     up, drink lime + salt, cold shower, yoga, tennis-ball massage
8:30   morning steps (outdoor walk & voice memo journaling)
9:30   make coffee, write on paper, meditate
10:15  piano
1p     breakfast + inbox
2        [work block 1]
4      lunch + correspondence window
         [work block 2 / meetings / piano instruction]
7      dinner + correspondence window
         [concert, workout, reading, French/German, social time]
10     social media / news, optional
11     lights off ex candles + EOD writing: gratitude, plan next day
<11:59 bed

8 hours for eating, 16 hours for fasting. 8 hours’ sleep.

Enforced downtime. If I don’t, I won’t, and both life and work quality go freefall.

I’ve noticed the more attention I put into the end-of-day writing, the better the next day goes. I fill out what occupies tomorrow’s work blocks (usually music or admin), what to write about, and what happened today that was lovely, storyworthy, or offered a lesson.

During periods of big projects — true right now — the writing practices serve as checkpoints to stay on track, zoom out, and discover next actions.

These days, “writing” drops into 5 possible buckets:

• Voice memos, usually one per day — if interrupted they can be resumed

• Paper notebook

• Typed, into a computer document

• Piano logs of music work: the regulars are sight-reading Bach, learning new songs by ear, and technical exercises

• Apple notes, one per day, for jotting randomly out and about

Paid Subscriber Coffee Hangouts + Upcoming Gifts

This is the second issue where I’ve opted to not include a paid section, mainly because this platform doesn’t support the spirit of publishing entries that are 90% free with a bonus for paying subscribers — e.g., no way to let free readers comment on paid posts, etc.

So then, dear paid subscriber, you might ask: what cool perks are offered?

First, it’s time for a coffee and snacks hang with each one of you, to say hi and inquire what you’re up to — I’ll reach out individually by this weekend 📮.

Second, most likely I’ll write separate “fully paid” posts.

Third, filed under “special gifts”, you’ll still get albums free, in advance, or exclusive and not available otherwise. (The Travel Poems boxset is still available with an 80% discount, unlocked by the secret subscribers’ code.)

Fourth, something radical is brewing: a limited edition 1/1 art piece from the Proof of Play collection (“Day 73” was enclosed above) will be made available to all paid and founding members.

Thank you for stopping by — and much love 🍪

90 minutes later, we signed off at 21 attendees1 — blackjack!

If you missed it, here’s the replay plus chocolate sprinkles2.

Video is now sync’ed3 to a microphone under-piano: the quality’s richer and connection hiccups are winked out to higher dimensions 🐦‍⬛.

This session’s a stream-of-consciousness, exploring a theme from various angles.

the farthest departure from the causeway: 56:20
other diversions at 12:15 … 16:38 … 24:00 … 27:50 … 29:50 … 34:50 … 37:40 … 40:55 … 42:20 … 51:00 … 56:20 … 1:14:00 … 1:19:00

If you’re down for more live-music sessions, hoist a pirate flag in the comments — and drop what day/timezone you’re often around: I can then coordinate with your here-and-now-ness!

much love.

p.s. issue no. 28 is out in a few days!

The air carries the smell of cumin, garlic, and slow-roasted tomato: your spontaneous creation, simmering through an open window.

Overhead, a breeze stirs the canopy, flickering mottled shade across the clay terrace. Wisteria petals dance on invisible strings. One lands above the back of your hand.

The tower bell chimes once.

Then again, softer. As though it, too, prepares for rest.

[ Sit down at a table of blue tiles ] —

You rustle into a wicker armchair, shared with a village kitten curled up in half-moon.

Somewhere, down a cobblestoned alley, someone is singing.

And without thinking, you begin singing too — is it the same tune?

// Side B //

A hearthy hello from Campfire Sparks! Thank you for tuning in.

You heard two piano clips: last month’s 90-min live composition session bookmarked at minute-59; then in the video, a visitation to salty sea air on faraway melody, three days prior.

1 Epiphany That Cured My Procrastination vs. 8+ Courses That Failed

Brooklyn, winter 2013.

I’m walking through a blizzard to my local CVS pharmacy. Snacks for the weekend before it gets tragic. At the store I bump into my barber, arms full of the same idea (except sweet not savory), and within sixty seconds he rummages from his pocket 3 capsules of molly:

Here I gotchu, this storm’s gonna be crazy . . . take these, 1 per person, you’ll have a blast.

I had just bought a shiny Bechstein upright piano, because transcribing Jelly Roll Morton onto a Rhodes Mark II was not going to fly forever.

Two instruments now flank my bed, complicating the previous vibe. The new arrival is closer, basically on top of me.

Ready.

Gorgeous.

The piano lid stays open — and I don’t play.

Here’s my secret: I can’t approach a piano.

It didn’t start that way, not when I was 6 and asked for one, fascinated by the music coming from the radio — not in those early years, how the instrument unwrapped itself each day in our Phoenix, Arizona living room, 100-years-old, dazzling, decked in mahogany carvings like a lighthouse beaming a path for late-night explorations. But that was so long ago: was it just a honeymoon?

I forgot.

Snow seals me in for years, but my room always leaks time.

The city hums back to life, monochrome to neon. I gig in town, tour around the world, record albums — but mostly, I pace circles between radiator and piano, rehearsing excuses: need email, need burrito, need to set the mood just right.

The bench remains a foreign continent ten steps away.

When I practice, the feeling is magic. Rehearse for shows, run arps and bebop, explore the mysteries of Bach and Garner, arrange Black Hole Sun and Oblivion with that spirited thoroughbred leading the way.

It’s just that I spend most of every day avoiding it. Half the days, I dither, dally, dawdle, end up a no-show. It sucks.

One day, a friend invites me to church on a whim: I find myself in front of the pastor and congregation, in tears — confessing equal-parts frustration and confusion.

“I don’t understand why I can’t make it to the instrument that I love so much.”

10 years of this.

Meanwhile, 2 years after our CVS hang, my barber is nominated for a Latin Grammy.

This story is more common than it is told. The struggle, the ironically well-practiced downplay of the struggle. My own students, confiding in hushed admission that they’d signed up with hopes of rewriting the story.

1 monkey per person.

I felt I tried everything:

• Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Dutifully keeping up with morning pages for a week and a half.

• Transcendental Meditation.

• Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art: nodding with gusto the whole carnival ride. Must conquer La Résistance!

• A 10-day Vipassana silent meditation retreat in Belgium.

• 3 separate accountability buddies — one family member, two friends — each cycled to abandonment.

Spinning wheels create theories as illusory as holograms.

maybe i’m lazy and lack self-discipline
real musicians don’t wait for inspiration, they act
it’s gotta be stress — I mean hello, the topic alone makes me anxious

• I study Atomic Habits (Clear), Can’t Hurt Me (Goggins), Unwinding Anxiety (Brewer), Four Thousand Weeks (Burkeman). Draw diagrams, recommend them to friends . . . because I want to believe.

• Log an impressive stretch with an app called Streaks, finishing 60 consecutive days of “piano workshop”. Enough reps to enshrine a habit, no?

• Throughout these efforts, schedule each day — the kind of organization leading to calendars, Getting Things Done (Allen), and other time management systems.

But I always relapse into whiteout.

That time at my friend’s church, I hadn’t expected to tell my story, but I was even more surprised by what happened after. The outpouring of emotions from a bunch of people who came up to me. They knew how I felt, because they’d felt it, too.

The Terrain

Sketch a world map of the advice out there and here’s the main continents:

1. Just do it. — brute-force willpower and confrontations. influencers, gurus, boot-camps. regimens to adopt, supplements to eat.

2. Systems & hacks — rewards + punishments. habit stacks, pomodoros, gamified apps. devices and life optimization.

3. Social coercion — accountability in groups, public bets. external eyes as borrowed discipline.

4. Mindset makeovers — affirmations, moodboards, "the secret".

1, 2, 3 are pressure.

Pressure raises stakes, under assumptions that turning up the volume makes someone listen better.

4 goes in the opposite direction. Clarify your intentions, trust in the universe, and your desires shall materialize.

No shade on this list: if any combination of them work for you, that's wonderful.

But if not, or not really — not without baggage or burnout — then let me give you an idea whose time has come.

Here I Gotchu, This Storm’s Gonna Be Okay

2 years ago, I found my biggest trauma . . . waiting in the shadows for me my whole life.

One day I’ll tell the story. For now I’d like to acknowledge it’s some of the deepest wounds a child can experience. Re-encountering it was a surprise: traumatic again, in old and new ways.

I bring it up now because it prompted me to launch a submarine expedition, uncovering places previously hidden from my awareness, bit by bit; understanding how my insecurities and perspectives are connected — and eventually reshaping all my relationships: to others, to acts of creation, to myself.

I bring it up because everywhere I see people suffering from emotional pain.

It’s madness to only now learn of tools to heal wounds untouchable by conventional advice.

The new continent:

5. Embodied learning. looking for the source of the problem, usually emotional in nature, often hidden. in the case of past trauma, which practically everyone has in some kind, releasing stuck energy through the body.

We start by activating curiosity and asking questions:

Is there an emotional obstacle?
Or, does some part of me sense an action unsafe?

Unsafe can be subtle: a quick jaw‑clench when you picture the gym, a drop in the stomach at the sight of a blank page, a pang of stress about a social interaction. You could override such signals with “willpower” — but they’re going to keep coming back.

There is an embedded dynamic here that I find deeply beautiful: any recurring red flag is your own self gifting you the opportunity to release energy that got stuck. In fact, your entire being seeks out situations for such healing to occur.

So, back to the obstacle.

First, high likelihood your emotional obstacle to action is invisible to you — otherwise you wouldn’t be blocked.

Look for the source: even if you can’t see it, where is it coming from? Often this requires pausing long enough (minutes / months) to explore what’s underneath reluctance, negative feeling, etc. Almost certainly, the exploration will be uncomfortable. Scanning can happen through imagination, meditation, writing, therapy, conversation, and all other forms of self-inquiry — it benefits from every revisit.

Two more clippings of good news:

1. Staying curious in the face of discomfort gets stronger with practice and is cumulative, permanently.

2. No time limits. You can examine obstacles and stresses days or years after the fact, to perfect effect.

In 2023, I began seeing how my chronic, kryptonite piano procrastination was actually:

• fear of sounding bad

• fear of forgetting skills

• fear of running out of ideas

• fear of negative judgment — really my own

. . . and that all of these were the same fear: the fear of not being liked, same as the fear of not being worthy of love.

No wonder all attempts to apply pressure only made the problem worse. (Continent 4 always felt nice but irrelevant.)

As I explored this landscape and kept journaling, my life-long fears connected to music-making evaporated in weeks, and the piano became freely accessible at any time. This is no doubt the most monumental, empowering, joyous habit-change I’ve experienced, even next to others recently unlocked:

daily habit            how long I wanted it before it took

cold shower            spontaneous
yoga/stretching        months
morning walk           2 years
morning writing        2 years
piano workshop         decades
end-of-day journal     1 year
early bedtime          10 years
no screens < noon      5 years

There’s more work to do.

I am thrilled that the process remains categorically separate from “self-discipline, willpower, and grit” narratives.

Whichever core wounds someone is still hurt from — embarrassment, rejection, being “not good enough”, etc. — uncovering those from deeper levels allows surface resistances to soften, even dissolve.

It’s important to note: Examining feelings isn’t a detour from action; it’s actually upstream the usefulness of all other tools. And while dedicated time with a trauma-aware therapist can loosen deep-seated emotions, even a few minutes of honest body‑check — “tight throat, anxious; okay, noted” — can lower internal alarms.

Once safety levels rise, an alternative system you choose — “just do it (even if you’re scared)”, pomodoros, accountability partners — lands on more fertile soil.

I’ve found these resources the most helpful

• The Book: on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (Alan Watts)

• A Return to Love (Marianne Williamson) and A Course in Miracles (workbook)1

• Gabor Maté’s talks and learning resources

• Peter Levine’s Healing Trauma workshop materials — this is superhero stuff

• Extreme Ownership (Willink & Babin)

• A trauma-aware therapist who champions radical self-love

For creators, also these:

• The Gift (Lewis Hyde)

• Big Magic (Elizabeth Gilbert)

• Effortless Mastery (Kenny Werner), especially for musicians and performers

• On Connection (Kae Tempest), ditto

• Jack Butcher’s perspectives on permissionless creation

• Dickie Bush’s and Nicolas Cole’s frameworks

I believe there’s a book to be written on this stuff, especially for creators who face not only “being alive in this wacky world” but also “pouring soul into things they make” and “showing themselves vulnerably to crowds”.

In other words: this is a high-level survey — if you want me to go into detail or write a how-to guide on a particular aspect, let me know in the comments.

tl;dr — maximum agency; limitless love; you are amazing.

Tributary 3: Waveriding

Something terrible has happened.

I tried to write an album.

But the music refused. It multiplied, like weeds through a mystic ruin. Each time I touched the keys, new paths appeared.

Melody, rhythm, time itself — untamed, anarchic.

I had been feeding earth spirits into the machine, and it began to speak back, in rhythms no conservatory would admit.

The piano revealed itself not as a polite European harp in a box, but drums filled with secrets — ready to unleash their percussive soul.

So be it: the album cannot be assembled from tracks laid in a studio, or recorded out on field pianos, or other such “me-centric” nonsense.

Instead, it’ll be unfurled in full public view, as music+performance art — stream-of-consciousness note-by-note, a portal we’ll all jump through together, an invitational work to upends not only the fundamental role of the piano, but also our assumptions about how a collection of music is distributed, released, captured, learned, spoken.

Since the project sings a set of perspectives on the piano that I’ve never heard before, I originally planned to unveil all of them only with the album’s debut.

However.

Original plan is a no-go (see fever-dream above).

So the “album” has been expanded into a collaborative language.
and the “debut” has been expanded into a gift exchange rooted in oral tradition.

Therefore the reveal begins not in 6–9 months, but now.

The intro video above is a clip from Tributary 1: Embarkation, the first show I performed with the material.

Coming up in Issue 30: more of the music, where it’s from and where it’s going, and the distribution model.

Love you all.

🦤

Your jumps press waves through wildergrass, scattering pollen up in spirals.

[ Brush a hand through air ] —

Each mote sparks like fireworks, before breezes send it aloft: a silent pop-pop-pop around you.

The air out here is diagonally columned — are rays of daybreak passing through venetian blinds somewhere past horizon, angled just wide enough for giants to peek through?

Also curious: the light lingers like a lover’s kiss, bestowing glowing haloes upon its gaze. Your skin’s soaked with sparkles as soil welcomes water.

Nearby — a tree stump, weathered clean and etched with wavy grooves.

You approach.

And notice . . .

Beams refracted from the field shimmying into the wood’s rivulets, egging them on to hum lilting ditties. Voices in a choir, activating one by one, pyramids of harmonies weightless.

// Side B //

Thanks for tuning in! You were listening to “The Latesummer Fields of Light”, composed on the road. Here’s the travel setup at a hostel in Naarm, a.k.a. Melbourne:

And a video tour of the 2-minute session:

I’m a newbie to multi-track composition/mixing, but if you’re curious about the creation process from earlier on, let me know in a comment or repost.

The photo’s from 2020, during a trip to Danish southcountry. My top-two lifelong touchstones evoking profound calm are wild rolling fields, and clothes drying on a line.

A song about that moment before a first kiss ~

released over the weekend. “Sans Rien Dire” is the latest single from Josephine Pia Wild — I was chuffed to write the English-lyric portion with her.

Here’s some of the process — final lyrics on the left with syllable guide for us to audition phrases post-translation, initial ideas on the right:

You can listen to “Sans Rien Dire” on streaming/youtube. Lovers of words might discover an easter egg embedded between French and English lines, possibly more easily found by ear.

A stunning one-shot music video is on its way too — follow JPW for updates.

End of Intermission

Next issue of Campfire Sparks lands in a week, commencing Act 2.

Act 1 lasted 11 years: post-uni life as a jazz pianist.

Issue 29’s Side B will give you a good idea of the story’s tonal shift, including:

• How I flipped from “life-long avoider” of music work and writing, to dissolving those procrastinations. To my surprise, discipline + habits + “grit” were not the issue.

• Music and piano discoveries I’ve held secret for 2+ years.

• Why intense secrecy before / why radical transparency now?

• Paying subscribers learned some of these plans in advance — and will continue to receive exclusive music, gifts, stories. Always more behind the curtain (more curtains) 🛀.

• And footage from the first Tributary show.

Silhouette of a Piano in the Far Distance

A shadowy piano journey called “mysteries of the horizon” coming up — for streaming and download.

Thank you for your visit and your discerning ear.

Here’s the music paired with words; I’m floored by how the poet David Whyte speaks about horizons:

Read more

You swivel around to see a kid wearing a propeller beanie spinning furiously, scattering leftover droplets around him in a glimmering halo.

[ Glance up at the sheep-cloud, still afloat, poking the machine’s chimneys ] —

The kid tosses you an umbrella with a wink. “Here, take this,” he says. “But you won’t need it for long.”

Sure enough, the sheep bobs and slurps back into nothingness. Onlookers murmur, drift away in search of the next spectacle.

You notice a stall crammed on all sides by mismatched awnings. At first it seems unremarkable, but then this block-lettering:

CLOUD EXCHANGE / STORAGE

What’s this? Wooden cards on velvet pillows. Etchings of overlapping swirls.

Only . . . the clouds on the cards are moving. In one, an animated thunderhead flickers with far-off lightning. Another reveals a shroud of fog creeping over landscapes of barren trees. The stall owner, a young woman wearing goggles as if permanently planted on forehead, slides a deck toward you.

“Pick a cloud, any cloud,” she sings monotone. “Or trade your own if you got ’em.”

[ Reach for a card ] —

The susurrant pattern on one of the surfaces beckons. You flip it over to find instructions scrawled in a neat script —

You picture leaning head-first into a luminous cotton-candy ball — seeing glimpses of starfields, or yesterday’s sky above Casablanca: the hush of climates impossible.

Suddenly, a vapor twirls out from the wood.

Its pulsing sphere forms just above your fingertips. Could it be coaxed larger — made into a jukebox for one, or teleportation device, as the rumor goes? The stall boss watches, probably reading your mind, her goggles reflecting the silver sky.

Before you can test it, the propeller-beanie kid shouts again from behind.

“Hey newbie!” His grin all sparkles. “You gotta see the ladder someone built to touch the highest ones. Come on!”

He darts off into the throng, leaving you caught between songs. Somewhere not far away, the brass cloudmaker chugs back to life.

// Side B //

Thank you for tuning in <3 . . . you heard some solo piano straddling New Year’s crossing ~

1. Two variants of sneaky blues:

   1. 0:00 — basement-and-attic, 2-feel groove from 2024 Dec 23, to score the propeller-beanie kid.

   2. 0:36 — four-on-the-floor “nasty” swing / minimal stride from 2025 Jan 9, for the cloud-exchange stall.

2. Floating melodic cross-rhythms, 2025 Jan 10, scoring Personal Cloud Brew 6.

The photo: fireworks we launched into the sky above Berlin — mayhem on the streets, between moments of taking shelter — right after counting down to the future.

My Grandma Turns 100

I can’t understand the passage of time.

One loop repeats: I encounter poetry exploring its twisting paradoxes, think the scenario sorted, then realize the essence of time is as impenetrable as ever.

But it all makes sense for Grandma.

These first weeks of 2025 I’ve spent in the company of her intrepid badassery, her four cheeky sons (my uncles), and their families — in my home country of Taiwan. After her birthday the lunar calendar slunk into the Year of the Snake, sparking round two of celebrations anew: banquets, firecrackers, red envelopes, whiskey and wine, portable karaoke machines1.

I tell friends I’m visiting this wonderful person who hails from the 1920s — she, who raised me my first four years of life (taking turns with my wet nurse) — when she was already in her late-sixties.

They all ask the same thing: what’s her secret?

Mirthful and voluble as ever, she’s eager to tell you herself:

1. Fill your heart with love,

2. gratitude,

3. courage,

4. and patience.

A lifelong educator and choreographer, she spoke spiritedly on her approaches to life, decision-making, art, commerce, teaching, and so on . . . and I realized how much I owe to her. All I try to do is paths she already trailblazed:

• Teach by encouragement, not punishment.
• Find your own road.
• Help others on theirs.
• Rebel when you must.
• Make things with meaning.
• Open up endlessly and forevermore.

These eternal lessons are her legacy, appended with however I can extend it — and all our collective stories, in turn, embedded within the universal compendium.

In 2022, my grandma published two books.

One’s a memoir starting with family history. Daughter of two Hakka parents (a tribe indigenous to Taiwan), alongside fifteen siblings — !

The other’s her life work in dance creation and education: how she interwove folk music with threads of Taiwanese history embedded into her pieces. She continued to champion art embodying tradition + folktales even into the decades when it fell out of fashion, competing with pop troupes, winning handily anyway.

In 2025 I’m translating these volumes to English. I’d love help, so if you can read traditional Chinese — mine is passable but I miss nuances — let me know!

🧧

Home is a story unfolding

I’ve been re-connecting to Taiwan — actually, connecting for the first time.

Growing up here intermittently (0-4 with Grandma; 9-11 then 15 years-old with Mom), childhood was always mediated through relationships with grown-ups, so I never discovered this island for myself.

But two years ago a seedling planted.

Kicked off by forming a Taiwan Band2.

How it started: Chien Chien Lu the Magnifique was not only down to play an album release show together, she also hipped me to local musicians keen on organizing a tour to put out Travel Poems . Chapter 2 . The night sea.

Shows on opposite ends of the island. Dovetailed with bamboo forests, tea plantations, forests and beaches, windy peaks, gorges otherworldly. Food varieties unlimited.

But this time, coming around expressly to see Grandma, it’s just Taiwan & me.

No gig dates, rehearsal planning, or sightseeing FOMOs. The focus is being home: my 1st time with intention. Revisiting intriguing places. Hiking fave trails. Sneaking into university practice rooms (highly recommended any city in the world).

In two weeks it’s transformed right before my eyes: from a bit sad3 to dear and lovely.

Before we get to the exclusive section, I want to thank you all for being here. Your presence means more than you know.

🍫

Secrets of Rhythm Piano (That You Can Hear)

I keep banging on about the piano being a drum — more precisely, a set of 88 drums — for reasons that keep expanding.

This issue’s music clip takes us through the entire process of discovering yet another new angle on the drumlike essence of the piano, of which there are infinite:

1. source material (transcription) →

2. transposition (not always needed) →

3. finding the seed →

4. exploring other rhythmic voices to play in parallel →

5. familiarization with mechanics →

6. following the ear to layer melody and harmony → (loop back to #4)

Steps 4 – 6 are often cycled, as they are in this 8-minute workshop:

Read more

She waves for you to get closer, then bam! Stamps your forehead with the ink outline of a raindrop.

You’re ushered into the flow of foot traffic. Muddy sneakers, jostling families, sudden laughter.

[ While shuffling, steal glances at the pamphlet pressed into your hand ] —

It’s written in a language of odd symbols — like nothing you’ve seen.

But while none of the runes make any sense, an illustration of a brass tractor pops out as worth visiting.

Oof. The crowd has stopped right in front of it.

The tractor’s no tractor at all: a colossal contraption, yes, but outfitted with valves and spinning instruments measuring its environment. So, either a science experiment or a factory on wheels. Could be both.

It seems to be preparing something.

The crowd waits — watching its own reflections in the machine’s chrome, which has been polished to a golden gleam. Children look expectant. The young ones can be caught watching their parents for how they too should feel.

At first subtle, a clacking sound from inside the machine grows louder and faster — until it’s a low hum. The hum rises in pitch, lowers, rises again . . . then, sudden stop.

No one makes a peep.

A boy pulls on his grandfather’s trousers, points to the sky.

Out the chimney tube, at the engine’s top, thick smoke appears. But not emitted so much as extruded, congealing into a grand ball of fluff, forming what appears to be quite the lifelike, 3-dimensional sheep — right above your heads.

Cheering and applause erupt. Someone jumps, reaches just shy of the new cloud.

[ Try jumping too ] —

You leap high as you can, hand outstretched.

The sheep starts to rain.

// Side B //

Thanks for listening! Those were two live-concert excerpts, both fully improvised. The first was from Tributary 1: Embarkation, 13 months ago (announced Issue 13); the second from Tributary 2: Windfinding, some months after.1 New York City subways presented the above photo opportunity, the week I moved there and found myself flabbergasted by talent at every turn.

Pick your favorite glyph! Mine’s duck-on-a-ball — 5 down from the top: clearly the story of Atlas, just upside-down and waterlogged.

I didn’t want to admit it, but . . .

. . . I’ve been overwhelmed.

Last issue, when publishing lessons learned from creating Live Happenings, all the signs were there. Fully 3 out of 8 items on the list professed the need for clarity and organization!

Some good news:

1. My journey to clarity is now underway, with steady progress.

2. I’ve been documenting the process as I go.

3. Ongoing observations will be distilled, then summarized, for all readers of Campfire Sparks, in case they’re helpful to anyone else.

Can anyone relate to:

There are so many things I want to do, accomplish, and build, but I don’t know how to achieve all of them?

Variants of this thought have bubbled in my head for 6–12 months, reaching their peak the weeks after the Taimom exhibition. The end result, crystallized:

I now know everything dreamt can be made reality. But I doubt my ability to.

Seeing this made me step back.

All my personas and I gathered for a huddle. Okay, what’s going on here — where are these doubts coming from, and who among us knows a way out of this mess?

And why was I keeping myself busy, trying to plow through one project, then another, incessantly task-switching without seeing the big picture?

A Miracle Worker Returns to the Job

For 20 years my best way to examine and solve things: writing.

I began journaling in 8th grade in Boulder, Colorado. It started on the computer. I pecked notes into a file called “women.txt” — for it had become non-negotiable, my need of an outlet for thoughts and (let’s be honest) mostly frustrations.

Months later I created another file.

That series — each titled by the dates it bookends — recorded the “leftover” thoughts, though that changed after an evolutionary leap:

But I have to admit women.txt is more entertaining than this more serious, less interesting file.

01 - 09060407.doc

JANUARY 30, 2009, EVENING: NEVER-ENDING INTROSPECTIONIST

By the way! Women.txt is history. All pontifications now go here :).

02 - 01080209.doc

Quickly it became my closest confidante, keeper of secrets, cheerleader too. Whenever I found myself at wits’ end — basically all the time — I’d collapse in a heap before the journal’s blinking cursor, desperate to make sense out of the latest confusing life-thing. At some point in each entry, the tone would switch to addressing myself as “you”, channeling the 1-year-older brother I never had.

It worked wonders.

But that system’s no longer enough.

Consider the current mix: I’m in Journal #20 on the laptop, Journal #6 in paper notebooks, a forest of voice memos and apple notes. I’m swimming in a sea of introspections, ideas to convert them into actions, and attempts to corral those into priorities.

There’s the problem. The pen, my trusty tool for helping me make sense of life:

1. is still great for reflection, but

2. less-great for transforming ideas to reality.2

Until now.

How I Learned to Love the Pen, Again

Do you, too, want to shape blobs of thoughts into succinct action-plans?

Among the things I tried, here’s what ended up moving the rollerball. All four connected to writing:

Step One: Gave myself the boldest prompt I could muster.

What’s your life mission? You can revise or update this at any time, but what is your purpose, as you understand it here and now?

This came out:

I empower people towards freedom. I can best achieve this through invitations to wonder; through facilitating experiences of music, art, and connection; and through the exchange of helpful ideas grounded in honesty and love. 3 vehicles to action:

• By creating revelry and welcoming others to join.
• By initiating/collaborating in art experiences centered on unique music for people to explore and participate in.
• By helping ignite creative potential: you, too, have a universe to express in your own ways.

These surface 3 roles. Festival + Event Creator (taimom, ßupercollider, Live Happenings). Artist (music, photos, words; live, crafted, collab). Coach (piano liberation workshop, educational courses).

Now each project needs its own mission, too, tying back to the big kahuna. For example:

Piano Liberation Workshop: Start improvising on piano immediately, at any level, even from scratch.
Falling Sea (record label): Helping artists offer meaningful experiences with music at the core.
The Air Is Made Of Music (a.k.a. Taimom): A global art collective elevating the magic of music in our culture.

Music + art projects also require purpose — e.g.:

Travel Poems (album series): Cinema, with your eyes closed.
Teleportation Booth (mobile art exhibit): Step inside to be transported by music & sounds.
Proof of Play (photo/video series): Open-studio snapshots of music and photography in progress.

1 neat side effect of this “define mission” step is it makes presentation of work easier. Everything was already written.

Step Two: The pen has new tricks.

I have a confession: I’m scared of drawing.

This is an embarrassment royale with cheese, because if I try to describe my fear, my own voice echoes in my head. It’s the voice that reminds me to practice what I preach. It’s the voice that knows “piano improv” in and out, who will go toe-to-toe against any music school, instructor, or student, any hour, any day, to argue that everyone can learn to improvise on the piano, which can and must be based on joy, with absolute zero “talent” requirements, with no need to learn theory, sheet music, etc. . .

My go-to analogy for years has been: “playing piano should be made as intuitive as drawing — one can start anytime, no expectations.” 👀

I’m even afraid of sketching a mind-map (of mostly words)! But a month ago, dear friend Camille recommended that I make one, to define Taimom more clearly, for communicating to others, to continue building the team, to grow it into what it needs to be — so I grit my teeth:

Step Three: Write everywhere.

As someone who gets distracted easily and has a hard time remembering fleeting thoughts — I have been craving a Master List Of Lists for a month or two now.

What’s in the LOL?

• Story ideas + scenes from the day

• Things to write / publish

• Inspiring quotes

• Project ideas

• Active projects // Progress // To-do

• People (to reach out to)

• What I learned + found

• Stuff to check out

Most of these are running lists I can add to: they end up as separate apple notes already categorized — or, if the phone’s not available, I’ve doubled-down on keeping the notebook in tow, everywhere, even bedside.

Writing everywhere includes voice dictation: combining walking/biking and speaking ideas works wonders especially when ideas yearn to be freed onto the page but somehow got clogged.

Step Four: Honor the flow.

Seems everyone has always known about the Pomodoro technique, including myself, and yet I never tried it until two weeks ago.

I’m head over heels.

My current timer settings are for 33 minutes and 33 seconds of work, alternated with 5-minute, 55-second breaks. When writing, the break timer can be frustrating when it sounds — but when I get up from the desk to jump and run around, I’m free to continue brainstorming or talking through what I was writing about.

Then when I sit back down, the flow continues.

Knowing that there’s a time limit presses me into focus mode.

I haven’t found a workable way to combine Pomodoro with piano time, but maybe it’ll appear. Do you have your own experiences with the method? I’d love to hear.

Latest Fascinations

You know when you’re in a movie mood but aren’t sure what to watch? The search party commences, flashlights rattling.

Last week, the lady and I browsed a few, then struck this bumbling cold-open:

I took the government’s advice to, um — fuck, what do you call it? — uh, retrain . . .

. . . I’ve retrained as a ceramicist because it’s no longer viable to be a musician.

Nick Cave, drier than a martini. We set off on a revelatory journey through Nick’s music, musings, shot and recorded in mesmerizing splendor.

My favorite part of This Much I Know to Be True (2022) is the tender tension between Nick and Warren, especially when discussing their (hilarious) differences in songwriting process.

The finest, most condensed, most entertaining introduction to storytelling I’ve encountered: Matthew Dicks interviewed by Shane Parrish for The Knowledge Project.

Does anyone else find it fun to learn about the inner workings of stories?

While I do want to become a better storyteller in the way that Matthew defines it — I’ve started doing his “Homework For Life” (anyone wanna join?), and agree with all his perspectives — I’m also curious about the outer edges of storytelling.

As in: lesser-explored paths, poetic meanderings that grab us in other ways, and novel framings. Experiments include this newsletter (all issues above the fold) and other writing that seeks momentum through offbeat means, for instance:

Sidebar: Matthew’s close attention to story beginnings mirrors my fixation when teaching piano improv, namely: we must get to the enthralling stuff immediately, instead of boring people with “the facts” most people think “need to be established first”. In the case of storytelling, that’s background/historical information; for piano improvisation, that’s learning scales or other common, unnecessary barriers to connection + musicality.

I adored this conversation between Esther Perel and Rick Rubin — it’s a smooth skipping stone across Tetragrammaton’s stream of surprises:

I’m Always Doing Things I Regret Tomorrow

You ever thought of pleasure and happiness as opposites?

Not me — despite years of trying to pronounce eudaemonia in college — until last month. Endocrinologist Robert Lustig:

Pleasure and Happiness

A lot of people equate the two.

But I’m here to tell you that they are completely different.

Pleasure is short-lived, Happiness is long lived.

Pleasure is visceral, Happiness is ethereal.

Pleasure is taking, Happiness is giving.

Pleasure can be achieved with substances,
Happiness cannot be achieved with substances.

Pleasure is experienced alone,
Happiness is experienced in social groups.

The extremes of pleasure all lead to addiction, whether they be substances or behaviors -- yet there’s no such thing as being addicted to too much Happiness.

And finally #7 -- most important --

Pleasure is dopamine, and
Happiness is serotonin.

There’s one thing that down-regulates serotonin: dopamine.

Pleasure: the more you seek, the more unhappy you get.

Las Vegas, Madison Avenue, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Washington D.C. very specifically, and in a coordinated fashion, confused and conflated the term Happiness with the term Pleasure -- so that you can “buy happiness”.

And in the process, we have become most decidedly unhappy.

(Source link)

Robert’s talk stuck with me. The more I think on it, the more obvious he’s right.

When considering the limited hours in our days, in our lives, the choice to pursue pleasure- vs. happiness-boosting activities places them in direct conflict.

How stark the consequences.

Compounded over time, routine prioritization of one over the other leads to polar-opposite life outcomes.

A razor could be fashioned, used at any decision point:

Will I be happy I took this choice tomorrow + next week?
(Plus its fun variation) What choice makes for a better story?

There’s even a twist — some things are both!

Whatever you find in life that enhances both pleasure and happiness: treasure these for all your days.

What’s on your shortlist of pleasure- and happiness-causing stuff? I’ll post mine here on a post-it in a few days.

You Are the Ones Who Make This Possible

It’s almost time to record The Tributary and I’m getting nervous about it.

For two years, I’ve locked myself in a cabin out in the woods, crafting a story by candlelight.

If I keep tinkering in secret I’ll go crazy.
If I abandon it I’ll get even more insane.
But if I reveal everything now, before recording the album, I won’t be able to make it at all.

Pretty weird.

I’ve shown the ideas to a few close friends, obliquely through live shows — 2 small Tributary-themed concerts, outdoor open-studios earlier this summer — and a more linear, course-by-course presentation here, at the tail end of Campfire Sparks issues, for paid subscribers.

If you were there at Tributary: Windfinding, after the 2nd clip up top you would have witnessed it morph into this creature 🐙:

Read more

A herringbone-brick path runs past the few closed shops and colorful banners hung from balconies. Crocheting on her stoop, a silver-haired vendor smiles to you from beside a generous bowl of miniature stuffed cacti.

Each step, the tower of the moon approaches.

Partially collapsed centuries ago, the spire still stands an upright splinter, a beacon atop the mountain, rebellious though no longer imposing.

There’s no way past the wrought-iron gates set into the retaining wall, but you peek through them anyway. Tall grasses, stone remnants.

On the ground: a green fruit, tomato-like, catches your eye.

[ Pick up the fruit ] —

It’s pristine but unripe, fallen from the tower’s most loyal companion: a tree brimming with persimmons. Clouds of royal green sporting dots of autumn.

Wandering under its canopy, you spot a bright orange persimmon above — way out of reach. But pulling down a connecting branch lets you just barely clasp its round, plump underside with your other hand.

The fruit is so soft, it splits apart with a pulpy tear (half of it still attached) . . . then sling-shots away from you as the branch rebounds.

[ Look at the half you’re holding ] —

The persimmon fruit hums from within: a forgotten melody, of something luminous.

// Side B //

// note: there’s a gift announcement 1 section down 💌 //

Thank you for tuning in! You heard 1) “Honey and Spirits” mid-story followed by 2) “komorebi” at the coda.

1) “Honey and Spirits” — off the newly released Travel Poems 3, featuring drums effervescent by Nir Sabag from 1:40 onwards1 — is the only song I’ve chickened out of playing live 🐔.

But not because of the song.

Travel Poems shows are a mix of compositions, improv, soundscapes, and spoken stories — rewritten each time we feature a different special guest. Each run of performances I draft a new stage-direction cheat-sheet listing each performer’s stage entries + exits:

That’s the set-1 script from our October 6 album-release show — featuring a dancer, Camille Jackson, for the first time:

Why have I wussed out of playing “Honey and Spirits” live, twice? Because I always planned the Booty Story before the song, and in the moment get too scared to tell it. With an embarrassed side-eye to the other musicians on stage, I sheepishly omit song and story and so we skip to the next feature. ’Cause here’s how the Booty Story starts:

My favorite kind of phone call is the booty call [mime raising phone to ear].

Especially when it’s someone I really like, but it’s too early to tell them that.

I think a good time for a booty call, to make one or receive one, is when it’s snowing outside . . .

Harrowing, right? Well, I’m proud to announce that, even though it took all 7 years of Travel Poems’s trilogy to release, the Booty Story has as of now been performed for a live audience 🐣.

While we wait in the wings for a properly mixed video, here’s a clip of another story-music pairing2:

2) “komorebi” is a ~7-minute excerpt from September 26’s morning piano.3

Side A’s photo is from Sovana, Italy, taken after our 5-day exhibition wrapped. You’re looking at Aldobrandesca Fortress and the actual-named “Tower of the Moon”, near a 15th-century church built on the ruins of an even older 11th-century Etruscan church sporting a crypt from the 7th century — interior shot:

Do You Remember When Music Was Magic?

I’m gifting you the latest album.

Travel Poems . Chapter 3 . There is no path back will be sent to all Campfire Sparks subscribers for free. Note: that’s subscribers as of November 11 — at press time, them’s the future — so if you nudge a friend into joining us by then, you and I are both gifting them the album 🔮.

Share Campfire Sparks

I’ll take a group snapshot of us all on that date, then send you an email under separate cover with a private download code just for you.

Last week, these words brought me tears:

From the talent, inspiration, and creativity of Contemporary Jazz and Classical pianist and composer Eric Pan, Bluebird Reviews was delighted to review one of the most original, imaginative, and musically breathtaking albums of 2024.

Travel Poems, the gargantuan 3-CD new project of the Taiwan-born artist, associates the powers of music and memories in a wonderfully and effortlessly cohesive style.

You can find the full review of Travel Poems at the link here.4

You should purchase the limited-edition trilogy if you like beautiful objects. Now that all 3 albums are out, the set is available in digital and physical — but only the boxset includes surprise gifts you can hold in your hands: 1 heartfelt, 1 useful, 1 mischievous, 1 mysterious, 1 unique, 1 sensible . . . and signed copies are also available.5

For Those Who Like Their Fiction Active

The “mad adventure” hatched by now boasts 15 contributors and counting. It’s collaborative, interactive fiction at Substack’s finest: each writer grafts new dimensions onto a bifurcating journey where the dead-ends are quick and undo-able, following the spirit of that font of timeless literature known as Choose Your Own Adventure.

Thank you , for inviting me to join! I immediately sensed that participation would be not only mandatory but also musical. It’s been a delight to traverse the previous entries in the tale, then extend the story with fun, slightly spooky sprinklings (and other melodies).

Start from the beginning of StoryVerse and make an impressive series of wise (?) decisions to end up at the following junction — then choose carefully! I had a blast putting together all 3 episodes.

Who’s the captain of this ship and where are we sailing? Thank you to Alex for the romp and for the poetic honorific:

And over in the realm of the living, Eric Pan continues the musical riddle (28/30/31) and expands it into something wonderful, but listen for yourself.

🎃

8 Harsh Lessons + 8 Cool Takeaways From Making The Weeklong Exhibition, Album Release Show, And Concert Series — Leading To 4 Actions I’m Implementing Immediately

My life flipped upside-down for seven weeks.

Each day I settle a bit: a dust cloud returning to earth.

I learned oodles from The Air Is Made Of Music: all the stuff that goes into putting on a weeklong event series unified around a final release show. Now that I’m on the other side, I’ll share 8 lessons hard-won, then 8 celebrations of success, followed by 4 immediate actions in response to it all:

The Harsh Lessons

1. Lack of organization is a bomb waiting to explode.

   
   I blithely thought “I’ve got this” all the way to 2 weeks before Opening Reception.
   
   I was wrong. I was completely overwhelmed.
   
   All my list-making systems broke down as I careened from one crisis to another — some new deadline for writing, printing, communicating with collaborating artists, website and socials, organizing a team to handle the bar, sound recordings, materials for installation . . . surfacing suddenly and for long enough to postpone other critical tasks.
   
   I delegated poorly or not at all, had assembled a team of too few, wasn’t even organized enough to ask friends for help with enough lead time. The most glaring consequence of this: invitations to visitors and press did not happen until 10 days before the event — a total travesty.
   
   Next time, I’m hiring a producer or project manager and mapping out together the timeline and breadth of all sub-systems involved starting over 3 months in advance — including a save-the-date 2 months out.

   

2. Stresses about the team are preventable.
   
   I was constantly worried about the 5 collaborating artists. When things became truly hectic, I (only sometimes correctly) saw myself dropping the ball when it came to communications with (and assistance in promotion of) these stellar souls who were interpreting the songs/postcards of Travel Poems through their own mediums. I kept wanting to be more on top of that — but such a “wish” doesn’t solve the issue.
   
   This got worse when 10 collaborating musicians also hopped aboard.
   
   In the future, prevention is key, but this situation calls for honest appraisals with myself about what’s happening, plus what’s realistic, followed by transparent messaging to the crew, no exceptions.

   

3. Mission unclear.
   
   This one’s a doozy. While still co-ideating a beautiful vision brimming with art and music, I started wondering, “how can we fill the space and the schedule with other things that are also awesome?”
   
   Chalk that up to attention-deficit disorder — and the lack of project-oversight personnel on the case from day one. I thank my lucky stars two angels emerged at the eleventh hour:

   1. Josephine Pia Wild, who helped clarify what the purpose of TAIMOM was (which led directly to the essay in Issue 24). Her most helpful razor was: When a member of the press visits the exhibition at any point during the week, when they walk away, do they have a single, unmistakable idea of what happened, and what is that idea?

   2. Brian Trahan, who helped craft the vision for the music programming and whom to invite. Bands playing their own songs didn’t make nearly as much sense as a series of improvisatory concerts with me in live collaboration: exemplifying the air being indeed made of music, and tying together the exhibition to Travel Poems like spokes on a wheel. The epitome of the execution of this plan would be an entire line-up of musicians I’ve never performed with — which is what happened.

   

4. Should’ve taken care of myself.
   
   One week before Vernissage, my nutrition and sleep and exercise went off a cliff.
   

5. Don’t dwell on the bad stuff.
   
   The best way to handle missteps and setbacks is action. Taking time to reflect is also great. Last, treasure all the things that went well.

   

6. Dream bigger.
   

   The very impulse to conjure grand things causes shockwaves.
   
   Believe in this more.
   
   Your initiative is not limited to what you think things might be. They’re infinite, because creation is infinity manifest — so allow them space to soar to realms unknown.
   
   This is a mindset, yielding immediate, palpable real-world effects.
   

7. Sharing (process) is important.
   

   The day before Installation was reserved for packing and transport. It ended up so long and intense, I broke my streak of posting my “What I played + wrote today” series. Proof of Play had been going strong for over 250 days at that point (and is now still on hiatus).
   
   I’ll dedicate room to write about Proof of Play and the wider lens of life/work/fear balance; for now, the summation is the more dialogue we have around art, its value, and our diverse relationships to it, the better — and the less isolated we are.

   

8. Clarity is everything.
   
   Upstream from every lesson here is clarity.
   
   All organization needed, every mission small and big, keeping life in healthful balance . . . the more clarity, the more effortless each step of the journey.
   
   The best thing? Clarity’s tangible + achievable. I’ll illustrate one surefire way in the “Immediate Actions” section below.
   

The Cool Takeaways

1. First off, jesus christo, it happened.
   
   We pulled together a majestic, cross-disciplinary extravaganza involving over a dozen artists and musicians, all responding creatively to the music and words of Travel Poems, creating totally new work in live collaboration, hosting hundreds of visitors, myriad sessions and interviews, capped off with an epic album release.

   

2. Immersive Audience Engagement.
   
   Visitors not only explored the intimate smell stations and gigantic charm mural and diverse projection works — but also stayed to hang out, taking their time with contributions to the Flying Piano Tree, entering the Teleporter Phone Booth to be transported, and curating the viewers’ photo gallery spread out over a light-table — answering our invitation to explore the intimate bonds between music and travel.

   

3. A Gathering of Unbelievable Talent.
   
   Acclaimed artists and award-winning musicians joined enthusiastically, showcasing an infectious level of commitment amid the experimental, impromptu setting.
   
   I am so grateful to all the collaborators, for their faith in the project and in me: to me that’s the most valuable treasure of all.

   

4. Grounded in Meaning.
   
   The art and music, whether prepared or live, felt anchored in clarity of intention rather than veering into randomness, abstraction, or esoterica.

5. Podcast and Art Movement Potential.
   
   The event inspired the development of an ongoing TAIMOM podcast, a global and collaborative art movement with clearly actionable paths to the next stages, and a platform for provenance-tracking of musical and artistic contributions to the Taimom Collection.

   

6. The Power of the Live Venue.
   
   Ideas I’ve nursed about running a venue or other sorts of cultural programming now come into sharp focus. It’s so much easier to see what’s required for a thriving brick-and-mortar operation — including what attracts crowds, encourages them to linger, what types of advertising and merch resonate, how revenues and expenses itemize, etc.

7. The Elements of a Great Team.
   
   I now know exactly the traits I want in those I collaborate with across varying layers: artistically, logistically, managerially. I’m better informed about what roles are needed, when, and what to handle myself versus delegate to others.

   

8. What Is Dreamt, Can Be Made Real.
   
   This gift is a big deal.
   
   We imagined, then made something that doesn’t exist much: an art exhibition centered on music that magnifies both, engaging the public’s sense of wonder and inspiring their care, attention, presence.
   
   Its subversive undertones are extraordinary, too.
   
   Back in Issue 19, in response to Chris Dalla Riva, I tried to make my best case for putting elbow grease into creating more demand for music, rather than merely adding to supply: through novel Live Happenings that aren’t your typical concert (or art gallery with a violinist added superficially, or burlesque show, or other “known” category).
   
   And now we did it. If this independent musician can put his money where his mouth is — on a shoestring budget — where are the millionaires? And the labels?

   

Actions I’m Implementing Immediately

We’ve crossed a rubicon. No return. There’s artists + musicians + audiences to empower — and the future to create.

Lots to announce! For now, we start simple:

1. Daily Writing: 90 minutes each morning.
   
   This is the fastest path to clarity — both for projects and for mission and to find out which actions need attention and why and how.
   
   If I had written each morning, the months leading up to The Air Is Made Of Music, so much time, energy, money — and anxiety — could have been spared. It’s worth noting this item also ushers along the next ones, like a mother helping ducklings across a river.
   

2. Publishing More.
   
   Our newsletter schedule got topsy-turvy — thank you, dear reader, for weathering the hiccup with aplomb!
   
   But it’s not just Campfire Sparks needing a frequency of publication, it’s also my backlog of essays to write: on art, on work, on love. They keep accumulating, never embarked upon, because I catch expectations, then fear failure.
   
   Begone. Let’s tick our way down the docket.
   

3. Weekly Planning.
   
   A calendar of what can be achieved in the following week, when mapped out on Sundays, helps me invaluably. Where this really shines is for tasks requiring lots of energy to switch in and out of. For me: what to eat, messages and calls, social-outing interactions.
   

4. The Two Halves of Each Day.
   
   I’m happier when I separate each day into two blocks.
   
   The negotiables are derived from the weekly calendar: these are realistic tasks I can achieve in each day. Ideally the fewer the better to reduce context switching, but sometimes quantity is unavoidable.
   
   The non-negotiables include ample sleep, walking outside, piano, food, lovely people, language lessons . . .
   
   Because the negotiables have a wild-card nature — sometimes projects take more time than planned, or some piece of technology isn’t behaving well, etc. — a time limit and boundary set in advance for that block is essential. And so the grand finale of this point is that even if negotiables are planned but cannot be finished as anticipated, the block ends anyway, and I skip ahead on my merry way.

Proof of Play Season Finale

Four entries to round-up Season 1 of Proof of Play / Open Studio! It began as an experiment in opening the pod-bay doors — partly just to prove to myself that I could publish daily. The way forward points to ever-more radical transparency: stay tuned.

Day 249, “atlas of serenity” (full log) —

Day 250, “my heart is a hotel” (full log) —

Day 260, “growing chrysalis mystery solved” (full log) —

Day 262, “spirits of babylon” (full log) —

Meanwhile . . . What’s Behind Cake Number Two?

We continue traversing the parallel universe of secret music, for paid subscribers.

The thread goes deeper, following the last two issues. After introducing the source material, then demonstrating a piano adaptation — now we reach a curious twist.

I think of this as a level-one transformation, already versatile enough for an astronomical array of possibilities:

Read more

Glimmers of dawn through the easterly trees. Crossing the ravine on elevated tracks was . . . how long ago?

You’re still matching your pace to the railroad ties even though it stopped mattering after the bridge ended.

The forest blurs under your feet, and the metal rails have evolved from serviceable, to rusty and tattered, to now: nearly invisible, under carpets of moss.

It’s as though the longer you follow these tracks, the further back in time you go.

[ Stop walking ] —

Abruptly, you meet a lake. Still, and shrouded in morning haze. The trees end — but the mossy railway continues, undaunted, underwater.

One canoe awaits you, tied to a dock, fishing rod mounted like a feather from a cap.

// Side B //

Aaand thank you for tuning in . . . you were listening to “Sequel to a Memory”, track 4 off the upcoming Travel Poems . Chapter 3 . There is no path back. The album’s out October 61, with release across worldwide streaming staggered for November 19. The photo, taken outside of Vilnius, Lithuania.

Accompanying this album release is the biggest show I’ve ever rustled up! 5 multi-disciplinary artists, and 10 phenomenal musicians, will respectively exhibit interpretations of songs from the Travel Poems trilogy, and play live-salon performances over 5 days and nights next week. Here’s the roster (RSVP + full event schedule at taimom.com) —

Yes, that’s the mind-blowing Quique Sinesi from Argentina, Grammy-winning classical guitarist. And yes, it’s the actual Shawn Crowder, drummer of Sungazer! I’m so lucky — and beyond chuffed that these Elements of Badassery are down to collaborate live with me at this very impromptu mini-festival.

The last few days, I wrote an essay about how Travel Poems led up to this exhibition2, and about how the entire 7+ year project resembles a cloud, from gathering to dissolution again. I’d love to share it with you:

From Travel Poems to The Air Is Made Of Music

1 — Gathering

It started with songs as gifts for friends.

In the summer of 2014, I asked people for topics to write songs about. Each friend’s bounty of ideas — one so concise, it contained a single word with no further explanation — conjured portals that appeared in an instant, leading to music I couldn’t have created on my own.

This led me to wonder about songs as gifts for places too.

Ever since I was four-years-old I’ve moved around different homes on different continents: travel, a constant companion. Maybe tied to that, new places buzz with possibilities.

The idea of making soundtracks for places created an expanse for exploration. I began carrying small keyboards with me when traveling.

Because I could write and refine compositions away from home, I started to think of these travel vignettes as postcards. I love postcards — that a postcard is connected to a place, reflective of a moment and an intention.

After a few years of on-the-go composing I noticed that when we travel around outside in the world, we also travel within ourselves. This was aided by Michael Crichton’s book Travels, though he discusses inward travel from the perspective of psychedelic drug experiences.

Being a jazz pianist for the majority of my regular music output kept me from believing that these on-the-go compositions could be viable songs. Some were extremely short, for one thing. It fell to longtime production friends Brian Trahan and Virgil Segal, to float the possibility, and help me envision a realm where the seeds of this music could take root.

(That’s the first “postcard for a place” I wrote, originally titled “Sunny Macedonia”.)

Many songs were already recorded somewhere in the world during the writing phase, and seemed to capture the air of their provenance, as if bottled and corked from the source.

For songs that needed to be recorded, we decided to continue the trajectory of “variety of pianos from different places”, now through active recruitment of pianos in various towns: one from New York City’s Steinway Hall, another a rumbling behemoth in an old German inn, and there a quirky spinet of unknown origin found at a Berlin flea market.

During the recording process I kept nursing the question of what world the music lived in. Though containing many improvised structures, too many songs stood distant from jazz idioms, swing, and the polyrhythmic source, for the collection to warrant being called “jazz”.

Nonetheless, we documented the music: mostly solo piano, a few duo and trio numbers with Nir Sabag (drums) and Hugo Reydet (bass) in Berlin — later enlisting C-Bass Chiriboga (drums) and Dean Torrey (bass) in New York as well.

Listening back, after recording 27 tracks, the music clarified its own purpose. To transport listeners to different places and experiences. A circle had closed, as plainly as M.C. Escher’s “Drawing Hands”: travel causes music / music causes travel.

2 — Storytelling

I would return repeatedly to the music itself to divine how Travel Poems should unfold.

27 was too many songs for a single album, and though I tried, I was not able to split it in two, so I tried a trilogy, which worked ideally for the material. The realization that the music had a transportive essence — owing to its origins? — pointed towards album-length adventures that could carry the listener through a journey.

The search began, for narrative soundscapes that evoked a strong sense of place, conjuring imagery redolent with the stuff of life: brewing tea, jumping from a cliff into the sea, fishing on a quiet lake. I ended up with a thousand found-sound recordings, themselves curated with care from around the world, requiring several weeks for assembly into stories that could cohesively score three musical adventures.

(Renamed “Bright Macedonia”, the song ended up on Travel Poems, recorded with Nir Sabag (drums) and Hugo Reydet (bass), and scored with soundscapes3. If you attend the Album Release concert next week in Berlin, you’ll hear us stretch out and take solos over it too.)

Endless decisions required during production/mixing/mastering — with Brian Trahan and Ruairi O’Flaherty — could be made swift by checking in with the now-maturing ethos of Travel Poems: “Does this help take the listener to a place?”

For the live show, I felt that the combination of music and sounds alone was insufficient to welcome listeners outside the frame of a musical performance, so I experimented with another addition: immersive storytelling.

During high school in Colorado, friends got together every week to play Dungeons and Dragons. These forms of live, transportive storytelling stuck with me; my resulting instinct for narrating second-person stories, rich in sensory detail, was indeed a natural fit for transportive experiences. I could describe environments for on-stage musicians to improvise to, for audience members to co-create with their imaginations.

These stories anchored instrumental music within vivid environments — and vice versa, provided live soundtracks to score those stories. Music grounds stories / stories ground music.

As a bonus: lines assumed to be present between listener and performer become translucent when the audience’s role as a co-creator of atmosphere and imagery increases.

3 — Invitations

Travel Poems has become a collection of varied pathways into music.

In 2019, access to a woodworking studio made possible some percolating ideas to build a Phone Booth “Teleporter”: an art installation on wheels that visitors step inside, to be transported by music and sound. The 2.5-meter-tall Teleporter was completed in a few months, built from salvaged German doors and windows over 100 years-old, housed in a new frame, and decorated as an object of curiosity: covered in multi-colored felt balls + woven fabrics.

When the Teleporter travels through public spaces, passersby (especially children) are drawn to its colors and out-of-place-ness: a beacon for the potential of exploration. Its height ensures visibility from a distance and its textures invite closeness, touch, and entrance through its swivel-open doors. Inside, a sequined-yet-soft “forest bed for the feet” greets visitors with care, and an antique telephone — with headphones resting atop — empowers interaction.

The written word was another pathway. When drafting the liner notes for Travel Poems, I expanded the mythology of each track through a postcard, written as one beams intimate thoughts to a loved one. Words on a postcard blossom from not just the place of their composition — but also the mood, the relationship between sender and receiver, their shared history.

I began releasing the Travel Poems albums during pandemic lockdowns, facilitating travel for everyone stuck at home — a story covered eloquently on-air by national public radio in the U.S. and syndicated worldwide. Chapter 1 came out in 2020, kicking off tours in Berlin and New York, and Chapter 2 in 2022, leading to new interviews, a “Favorite Album of the Year” award, and placement on the Spotify Editorial “All New Jazz”.

(“Oak Island” was picked for editorial selection at Spotify. Pretty unusual for a track with tons of soundscapes4 even before the music begins. Recorded with C-Bass Chiriboga (drums) and Dean Torrey (bass) in the Brooklyn session pictured above.)

Our release show for Chapter 2 was held in an art gallery in collaboration with two talented artists: a step towards multi-disciplinary offerings of Travel Poems. The subsequent tour required assembly of a third band, for coverage of my home country of Taiwan.

For the release of Chapter 3, I was curious to explore deeper collaborations. Teaming up with Mahzabin Haque for project management, we developed a multi-day exhibition where artists across disciplines could interpret the music + written postcards of Travel Poems through their own diverse mediums.

I began sending invitations to artists I admire.

I’ve been a fan of Hugo Faz despite never meeting them in-person: first as a Meme Card Artist for punk6529’s Memes project, where Hugo coordinated a video of a troupe on the rooftops of São Paolo — nude dancers covered in body paint, expertly choreographed for drone coverage.

Between filmmaking, photography, their own performance-art creations laden with wry critique of power structures, embrace of decentralized ownership as made possible by blockchain technology — and Hugo’s heart of absolute gold — I was elated upon receiving word that they were also a fan of my music and fully committed to this exhibition together.

Colin Aherne and I are kindred spirits in art: both creators of music and photography, and the interesting juxtapositions that occur through their combinations. Our conversations over the past year were, for me, a mix of surprises: that we worked in similar mediums and even aesthetics at-times, yet had divergent visions of what to express.

Hearing and seeing Colin’s work inspires me to imagine the possibilities of re-interpretations from vantage points similar and dissimilar to my own — in addition, his artistic choices prompt me towards reflective states that I feel would not occur to me even if I had taken photos from the same places on the same occasions.

I only witnessed a single performance by Camille Jackson, but was transfixed by her simultaneous expressiveness and restraint. As Travel Poems becomes more invitational to broader audiences, I’ve become increasingly appreciative of the response-impulse from a visitor towards the piece of music or art.

That moment someone decides to step inside the Teleporter, or listen to a story and imagine the environment described, such agency willingly committed is simultaneously a gift to the work, and a necessity for one’s actual experience of it. Camille’s creations seemed to welcome such commitment — and seemed to be “made whole” only when committed to by the visitor: the very same relationship I strive for in all my work. Invitations accepted are a big deal. I also resonate with her flair for improvisation, and am delighted that her range of movement vocabulary expands my mind.

Mahzabin introduced me to Carolina Boettner’s art — and immediately I was awed. Carolina’s transdisciplinary practices have taken her on explorations through science and ecology, video and other visual representations, live collaborations with improvised forms, and on and on.

For this project, Carolina proposed smell-art installations in dialogue with Travel Poems music and text, forming an indispensable foundation for our concept: to present music not merely as auditory experience. These would be interactive smells informed by a rich and wide understanding of culture, and expression of meaning, as it relates to the intimate bonds shared by travel and music.

I’ve been increasingly impressed by Magdalena Paz’s work over several years of knowing her, continually feeling astonished upon each revelation of yet another facet of her personality. Magdalena manages to channel herself directly through both painting and sculpture, despite their representative nature and possibility for distance from the self.

I feel her presence in her chosen subject-matter as well as the concurrent abstractness and playfulness exhibited in its execution — with clarity and intention. Recently, I learned that Magdalena also experienced an intensely on-the-go childhood. This surfaced a kinship to her and her work that I could sense but not articulate previously.

Finally, I invited ten musicians to create improvised music with me on each five nights of the exhibition: two to play the Travel Poems repertoire in trio-plus-dancer form for the final evening’s Album Release show, and eight to present their perspectives on music and travel in joint-collaboration.

The concerts are presented as open studios, in the manner of art-salons far older than even the Teleporter’s doors — where musicians are encouraged to pick up instruments as if they were lounging about, at home, spontaneously joining each other in duet or trio.

We sourced our exhibition title from the Travel Poems album liner notes — prefacing the postcard texts — written shortly after the songs were recorded:

The air is made of music.
Atoms play, particles dance,
ripe musical notes fall from shaking trees.
Wherever we go, melodies appear —
soundtracks begin performing themselves.

4 — Dissolution

As Travel Poems . Chapter 3 . There is no path back releases to the world, the end to the trilogy ushers a beginning of a different sort.

I see the story of Travel Poems as a single cloud’s life-cycle: music and sounds that once coalesced from the atmosphere, gathering for a spell: then inevitably dissipating again into water — or vapor.

But there will always be more clouds.

The Air Is Made Of Music expands upon the music and words of Travel Poems: when other collaborators join with their further remixes and panoply of perspectives, the project stretches into the future, unfolding in ever-unexpected directions.

Concretely: our TAIMOM exhibition, in October 2024, is but a first edition — so what happens next?

Artists around the world, commissioned to respond to the pieces presented here and now, on themes on travel and music, through their methods and their own lives.

Artworks re-scored with new music, alongside collaborations farther afield, involving, say, food combined with neuroscience.

As The Air Is Made Of Music grows, we’ll see exhibitions and performance-art conceptions and interactive installations built upon a foundation of transporting audiences through music and sound. The songs of Travel Poems needn’t be at the center, but their ideas live on, to tell new stories — and visit new destinations.

“Can home be the whole world?” (liner notes / postcard text for Chapter 1, track 9)
Can now be eternity?

Eric Pan
24 September ’24

Dear reader: what does travel mean to you?

Kindly reply to this email, or quote this issue with your response on Substack Notes, or send me a private message. I’ll reply with my impressions and, if you wish, typewrite your response on a card to hang in the exhibition space next week 💌.

Proof of Play // The 4-Fold Path

The daily-logging project is sometimes hard to keep up with, given this is the busiest time I’ve ever experienced (except for 7th grade which was obvi my peak) — but does feel more interesting when there is ample other stuff going on.

Day 241, “swift and wild our pulses” (4.5 hours’ logged studio time) —

Day 242, “all hands on deck” (2.75-hour log) —

Day 246, “mischief in the ice forest” (2-hour log) —

Day 247, “blanket of blue air” (¾-hour log) —

Sequel to a Memory

Growing up, sometimes the television would land on a cooking show, and I’d become gripped by the hullabaloo. But what I found most fascinating was not the food or the chef or my suddenly rumbling stomach . . . it was the logistics of how the TV crew had prepared the meals for various stages of readiness.

There would be a version of the cake batter that had already risen overnight.

And another version of the cake already baked — for the chef to blasély whisk out of the “oven” right after inserting another one, assembled live just moments prior!

All right: reflecting on this now, such logistics don’t seem to require galaxy-brain levels of architecture, but the image comes to mind because I find myself in the position of juggling multiple cakes at different phases of preparedness.

• Cake 1: Travel Poems, out soon in October. Ok.
• Cake 2: Recording the next album, its material secret, for reasons less-secret but still a bit secret.
• Cake 3: Publishing music from the studio every day, while not showing the secret stuff.
• Cake 4: Planning the sequel album to follow Cake 2 — they are connected and the follow-up is defined by its collaborative nature. This one’s now the most hush-hush, but needs to be shared with the potential collaborators.

Today, we ride . . . and continue the bifurcated divulgence! (Cool t-shirt slogan or nah?)

The Secret of Cake 2 is being unveiled for paid supporters of Campfire Sparks, one issue at a time. This current issue presents a transcription that completely unlocked a new dimension of the music for me:

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To your right runs a mid-torso-height wall of wood carvings, and a courtyard that opens up to the sky — from where light pours in.

It’s difficult to look outside, beyond the cloister overhang: the sun’s reflections off the lotus pond are brighter than white. Their blazing sparkles make it hard for your eyes to adjust back to the walkway’s shadows.

You don’t see your guide anymore.

When did she turn?

Corridors branch off to the left every 10 paces. Everyone’s wearing the same outfit and moving swiftly. You scan each hallway for the signature swish of her black robes: easy as spotting the right shopping cart from a Patagonian expanse of supermarket aisles by the odd wiggle of its wheels.

You don’t know where to go.

[ Wait, there’s music wafting over from somewhere ] —

You wander towards the song, honing in on its source by auditioning different turns.

Through trial and error you’re able to get closer. By some acoustical trick, the music always sounds as if it’s coming from the water even though it can’t be, based on the fact that when you walk back towards the courtyard it grows quieter.

You stumble into an empty room with no other exits.

Not quite empty: a lone monk sits on the ground, oversized banana leaf attached to her back, in front of two stacks of parchment.

She motions to you with a calligraphy brush, inviting you to come closer.

// Side B //

Thank you for tuning in! You were listening to an improvisation from March 14, recording #1: 10 minutes excerpted from 60. The photo was taken at the Cloisters, Manhattan — the first neighborhood in NYC I lived in, once upon a scorching summer. Trees and hills perched above the Hudson River. Kids playing in the streets, pushcarts offering Jarritos in every color. We lounged around the house naked, sweating without even moving.

After sunset the evenings would cool somewhat and I’d ride the “A” train, straphanging into various jazz jams around town: usually spots in the Village, with a stop at Cleopatra’s Needle or Smoke on the way back up those vampire-bebop hours ’round about 3:30am.

I never understood what really I was doing — as in, where is this whole jazz “thing” going, anyway? I just knew I loved the music and wanted to keep playing and learning more on the bandstand. It took many years and tours before I realized I was walking a path that was not my own.

The curious sense of looking around and not finding any recognizable goals . . . grew curiouser.

Musicians whom I idolized for their personalities, wise perspectives, infinite imagination — did not inspire me with their actual lives. Even when they were successful and rich and (apparently) happy and free. But I couldn’t see why I wasn’t inspired except by the music itself; I couldn’t even see that there was a disconnect.

Then came Travel Poems.

After a springtime of playing gospel service every Sunday at Mt. Carmel Baptist Church in Brooklyn, I split for the summer on a whim, and ended up showing recordings of some original compositions to dear friends Brian Trahan and Virgil Segal in Berlin, Germany. They proposed we begin recording them — and then we just . . . did.

That never happened in New York. Suddenly, I was also confronted with questions I never considered.

What kind of album would I want to make, if I could make anything? Don’t mind if I do! I’ll take:

• songs as vignettes — even short, koan-like . . . poems?

• different pianos all over the city + world to record on

• a different sonic world for each song, through production and narrative soundscapes

• some way to corral these weird 100 minutes of music into — I guess a trilogy album makes the most sense?

Then: what kind of show do I want to create, if it could be anything? Let’s try one featuring not just those soundscapes but also immersive, second-person storytelling (the precursor to Campfire Sparks). Then . . .

. . . like that meme of dominoes about to collapse into ever-larger ones, every question inexorably presented ever-deeper ones. Where are the audiences for this stuff? Who am I as an artist? Am I actually sure I prefer this path to a more tried-and-true route, for instance playing jazz standards or minimal modern classical music?

On Saturday, “View from a Llama” dropped 🦙

“View from a Llama” (buy or stream anywhere) heralds the upcoming Travel Poems . Chapter 3 . There is no path back — it’s the one of the more single-y tracks from the trilogy: not so poem-y, no quirky out-of-tune pianos, soundscapes only at the end. In a month, the whole album releases and, along with it, a 5-day music festival and multi-sensory group exhibition called The Air Is Made Of Music — in the most coup-like move so far, we even scored taimom.com 🎇.

Where is this whole jazz “thing” going, anyway?

To bring this story full-circle: now that the third + final chapter is releasing, we have finally printed CDs of the whole trilogy. Watch the music of Travel Poems enter the 3D world in my first-ever unboxing video1:

This is a limited edition of 200: 3-CD boxset, gorgeous cover paintings, treasure map track listings, 30-page liner-notes booklet2 with a postcard written for each track — priced at $40 for each trilogy set.

Subscribers to Campfire Sparks can order a trilogy for $20 — use coupon code “flint” for 50% off everything in the store, including any other albums.

Paid subscribers can order a trilogy for $8 — use the coupon code in the secret section of this issue — and 80% off everything 🧨

The Season of Collaborations

Colin Aherne and Camille Jackson have added their immense talents to the upcoming exhibition in October. Here’s one of Colin’s photo projects:

And a sampling of Camille’s dance performances:

By next issue, we’ll have finalized the music lineup too. Can’t wait to reveal and get everyone together for a proper extravaganza in a jiff3!

Any photographers in the house who have made or are thinking of making a photo book? Would love to hear your experiences and process since I am going through this now, quite literally dipping my toes in:

Proof of Play, Those Rails a’Hummin

In a spoonful of serendipity, this issue’s first recap entry references working on “Take the ‘A’ Train”:

“We are humans, but if you want we’ll be dancers :)” reads the graffiti on Day 229’s music video, “the woolly mammoth unthaws” (3 hours of logged studio time) —

Day 233, “a prelude to bewitchery” (2.75-hour log) —

Day 235, “where the water bubbles up” (¼-hour log) —

Day 239, “why yes in fact I do work here” (4.5-hour log) —

Everything Must Go

It was not long ago that I decided that it was imperative that I release music, faster, to make room for more ideas to arrive, to keep the imagination-cycle flowing, to rid myself of pesky “perfectionism” and just generally to have more fun.

And I’d still like it to continue.

Not only as an accelerant to a life lived more fully, but also broadened: to give more presents to dear real-world friends and internet acquaintances alike, to share more of what I know, to imbue as many things as I can with The Gift — that tangible, yet-you-can’t-really-hold-it, feeling that accompanies a gesture or object offered to you.

This week, Campfire Sparks welcomed its first Founding Subscription, a level of support that I am floored by.

And this week, all paid and Founding subscribers can order the CD trilogy essentially at-cost, plus shipping (also at-cost).

Plus another secret glimpse into the music of the upcoming Tributary album:

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The night air is warm, but your makeshift straw bed got colder and more damp since bedtime.

[ Look along the sky’s edges for a blush of dawn ] —

Parapets and pinnacles loom from all directions, at once cordial and unwavering: a gothic intervention, perhaps. Though the roof and bell tower collapsed long ago, it’s a wonder how the rose window and a few buttresses stand defiant. The unending stories that must be embedded in this rubble . . . the commissioning queen, the architects and townsfolk, the hands of how many stonemasons —

— suddenly you notice a slight change in light, nearby.

Eyes adjusted to your starlit surroundings, you fix your gaze on the source of the flicker. Behind half-collapsed walls glows a mystery, faintly.

[ Clamber across various ruins, to investigate the light-source ] —

In olden times, along clean-swept floor tiles, it’d be fifty paces to your destination. Now, however, none of the ground is accessible, and you’re forced to negotiate cathedral debris fallen earthward. Some stone chunks are large as a horse.

You move gingerly, taking care to not stumble or step into a gap large enough to swallow an ankle. Instinct tells you to make zero noise too, to surface suspicious sounds, and conceal your proximity in case there’s company.

Could there be a person here? Creatures visiting . . . or burrowed? Are you trespassing on hostile territory, guarded fiercely by someone — or something?

Ten paces now.

You consider possible paths, stepping forward where it makes sense. Now and again, you glance over to the emanating light: it doesn’t change but, trick of the mind or not, seems to grow more steady the closer you approach.

Up this close, the glow reveals its subtle iridescence: both yellow-orange and purple.

Shimmying up to the corner where you first spotted the light’s appearance sixteen minutes ago, you feel a tinge of nervousness. You steel yourself against danger, readying your body and wits for an immediate retreat: back to this side of the wall, even bolting for the previous room exactly like lightning, if need be.

Ever so slowly, you peek around the bend.

Atop a pile of rocks, one large gemstone sits, cleaved open after a long fall, its two halves emitting a marvelous radiance of unknown origins.

// Side B //

. . . thank you for tuning in today. That was two songs from the top o’ the hour — first you heard “The Cosmic Blink Expands” off Lullabies of the Pleiades, and then an 18-minute improvised exploration from the morning of July 8th. Together they assemble a passe-partout of peaceful mystery to score today’s written adventure.

Lullabies originated November 2020, as a commission by Keith Zarriello in collaboration with Sonder House. Keith found me wandering SubmitHub trying to wrap my head around how to promote my first-ever single released (audio+video // story+press) — and asked if I’d be interested in writing and recording some neoclassical piano music.

Would I indeed! I was intrigued by the idea’s creative freedom + creative constraint.

I embarked on the journey of writing a dozen songs with a few dabs of improvisation, selecting six of the most tranquil, recording them from lockdown with the help of Brian Trahan’s attentive microphone erudition. We both got sick from covid anyway.

We mixed the EP in Brian’s old studio with me “driving from the sidecar” —

— then Alex Saltz mastered the record, and the astounding Juliette Viger painted the covers: 1 for each single as they rolled out, 1 for Lullabies of the Pleiades collected entire.

It’s been fun to witness this side project become my most widely-streamed work so far. Listen now on this bandcamp player (or choose your music service here) — and purchase it if you’d like to support my work!

The Street of Birds

Hello to all songwriters out there! I haven’t talked lyrics much, ever, since I’m new here. So . . . *kicking around dirt* . . . let’s powwow! If I’m like an overeager parent jumping on every opportunity to mingle with all my kid’s friends first day of school, I can wait ’til tomorrow.

“Rue des Oiseaux” is my favorite track from Josephine Pia Wild’s debut EP, Multiple. Half the time when I listen to it I end up crying, from the poignancy of the lyrics meeting the swell of Josephine’s voice. Here’s the released song:

. . . and here are our notes, from working on the English lyrics together. Similar to collaborating on Dernière Nuit, the process of transformation from the original French was simultaneously restrictive and liberating. Final lyrics on the left, under a working syllable sketch — not unlike dolly tracks for a camera — and brainstormed snippets on the right, mostly ending up scattered about the cutting room floor:

[📮 Update 28 Aug: Josephine has posted the astounding story of how the French lyrics came to being — a story of cosmic abundance connected to the birth of her cousin’s baby — which you can read on instagram or her patreon which includes an early recording of the song.]

I love how these dual-language songs don’t reveal their English parts until late, well past the chorus. The resulting effect for me is they then arrive in a starburst of clarity, made potent by the poetry’s density, each word vital.

What are your experiences writing lyrics and interweaving them with music?

(By the way, if Substack doesn’t let you comment on this post without upgrading your subscription, feel free to reply to this email, message me, or “@” me in a Substack Note — pasting in the URL of this post helps but is optional.)

and now, for something completely different . . .

I’m over the moon in anticipation of exhibiting with these two artists I’ve long admired 🫠:

Hugo Faz, whose work in performance, nude, and queer art relentlessly pushes boundaries while carrying a heart of golden virtue every impassioned step. Here’s the intro video they made for their TAIMOM artist takeover last week (which also included short film, dance, a photography series . . . ) — 

Magdalena Paz, painter and sculptor who melds her artistic practices with her athleticism. She’s posting through The Air Is Made Of Music’s account this week, showcasing her background, inspirations, and studio snippets so far:

I resonate with both these artists so personally: with Magda, through my childhood marked by the constant disruption of moving again and again; with Hugo, through deep reflections on masculinity, and cultural perceptions towards those who present as male.

Follow along on insta for exhibition news or, better yet — sign up for the TAIMOM mailing list — this exhibition will be ongoing, all the way through Berlin’s 1st group show + concert series Oct 2–6, and into other cities as it expands 🎡

And They’re Spectacular

The lovely folks at Birnam CD sent over the first batch, hot off the presses, so naturally I roped the intrepid Anika into filming some unboxing vids with me.

Travel Poems, the entire trilogy, is here.

Today was the delivery and I’m out of time to prepare videos before this issue must ship — so here’s a sneak peek!

Next issue, you’ll get the recap of the journey these CDs will take to reach the various postboxes of press people and so forth — along with how to order them if you want a copy. Yes: there will be discounts for subscribers, and outrageous discounts for paid supporters 🍉

Proof of Play ✖️ Open Studio ✖️ 4

This issue’s round-up reveals my fascination with time as a storytelling device. Though: it may have been evident from the outset, that the entire POP/OS project is the passage of time: the experience of what life is, lived through making things.

Day 221, “time takes us where we need to go” (1 hour of logged studio time) —

Day 225, “the audacity of eternal youth” (5.5 hours’ studio time) —

Day 227, “time waits for you” (1.75 hours’ studio time) —

Day 228, “eddies in the space-time continuum”1 (3.75 hours’ studio time) —

Building a Mystery

Last issue, I did a scary thing.

For the first time, I showcased one example of a type of (piano) music I’ve never heard before.

It’s not just compositions, or structures for improvising over. It’s a collection of new perspectives: about what the piano is capable of, what a pianist is capable of.

Hearing myself read this writing aloud right now, it sounds grandiose, possibly insane.

But the more I delve into this way of playing, the more I awaken to the opposite: that I’m still underselling the potential of this music to myself. Not because I’m great, or that the music is destined to become popular, or revolutionize any trifling corner of the world — but because a sober assessment of music that has been created on the piano so far indicates that this represents a paradigm shift — and a portal opened, to music that I barely know about yet.

It’s time to share another angle of The Tributary project with you today:

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The surroundings look too familiar.

[ Nudge your vehicle towards a buoy marker glowing with the words: Botanic Reserves Upway 26 ] —

The sign is pristine, indifferent, offering no uniqueness to distinguish it from the others you’ve passed.

Have you passed this point already? Could be multiple times by now.

You set aside wayfinding and look around.

It’s a breathtaking scene in every direction. The sing-song cooing of skylarks in groups, diamond-shaped leaves burnished by late afternoon sun, the frizziness of the foliage here at the topmost skyforest. Watered by updraft mists. Ever-present sun.

No one else is milling about this high; you’re above even the wispiest clouds.

Patches of forest-substrate thin out enough for you to glimpse roots extending down into the air below towards the next forest layer, stretching like toes searching for lake bottom. A few levitating signs sprinkled here and there, glowing the same broadcast:

DO NOT DISMOUNT. NO LANDING. NO CONTACT WITH RESERVES.

You imagine ascending the next channel for views above the canopy — but before the thought completes, your craft’s already whizzing at-speed.

As your flight instructors say, the telepathy takes days to get used to.

// Side B //

Great to see you and thanks for tuning in! You’ve just heard an excerpt from a solo performance at Artistania in Berlin, 2019 — scored with drums today, for fun and curio, special for this issue. We’ve veered off a musical side-road this week, to balance out different styles of the imminent track-storm coming up:

1. “Dernière Nuit” — my first release as a co-arranger & co-lyricist

2. “View from a Llama” — the first single off Travel Poems #3 (out October 6),

3. 4 studio clips in this issue’s Proof of Play round-up, and

4. a secret composition from the next album, The Tributary.

Our co-conspirator cornucopia begins with Josephine Pia Wild, the world’s actual first handpan pop artist:

I was fortunate to collaborate with Josephine on the song’s arrangement, keyboard parts, and the English portion of lyrics. The song — French for “Last Night” — is about the experience of being image-projected onto by a lover who likely doesn’t know or care they’re doing so. There’s also a bitter seedling: the narrator knows she’s complicit.

The original, all-French version — lyrics co-written by Fabian Corre and Josephine Pia Wild — existed before Josephine decided to issue a mixed-language album. So we tasked ourselves with translation, transformation, and fitting the existing melody verbatim:

I love this way of writing lyrics: rapid brainstorming, puzzle-fitting, throwing around words and ideas, while always anchored to meaning. Head + soul + heart. I’m just getting started as a songwriter and I find the whole experience absolute dynamite.

Check out Josephine Pia Wild! More tracks to be unveiled soon 🧨

The Air Is Made Of Music

Speaking of cahoots, it’s finally time to introduce TAIMOM, the collaborative exhibition, the release concert, the transdisciplinary extravaganza, and the most adorable acronym1.

From Oct 2–6, together with 5 artists working across varied practices, we’ll put on an event series at The Ballery in Berlin, Germany, culminating in a blowout concert with interpretive dance and storytelling on the last day. Here’s me “inviting” the artists, scored with the upcoming single, “View from a Llama” (announcement) —

Travel Poems has been a 7-year journey from assembly, to recording, to release of all three chapters. It is perfect timing and synecdoche to the broader transition I’m aiming for as an artist: last week’s send-off of the final designs for CD-pressing, made from two of my favorite things, treasure maps + triptychs —

— to the next 5 weeks of introducing each fantastic artist, one by one. This mirrors my evolution towards tour-guide, towards facilitating experiences that are less about me, towards highlighting what cool stuff other people are doing.

This week, TAIMOM presents the astonishing Carolina Boettner, co-founder of Flusslab, and artistic visionary, combining disciplines from visual to mixed media. Her piece “The Residual in Scene” is an investigation into waste through science, art, and music (hello “Symphony for Algae” 💃) —

For our group exhibition, Carolina will present various stations of smell art, interpreting select song-postcard pairings of Travel Poems. It’s a must-visit. Follow along the TAIMOM instagram account for Carolina’s other showcases, the next artists coming up, and announcements of the exhibition’s live and virtual events.

Hat-and-Feet Tips

• Wonderful live shows last week by Elsdeer and Mike Rauss.

• Take 4 minutes to jot a list of delightful details from your day. Once you start reframing all peculiarities as delights — no matter how cringe, infuriating, failuresque — you’ve conquered the world.

• I was just introduced to Margaret Watts Hughes, who took Cymatics (a.k.a. Chladni Figures) through her own gorgeous trajectories —

  

  — by Elizabeth Shull, a contemporary artist (and fellow UCSC alum!) whose stunning creations illuminate mysteries I’m only beginning to learn of:

Unabated Proof of Play: 4 Entries

Day 208: “achilles waits to strike” —

Day 211: “cloud-shrouded gown drying on the rocks” (full log) —

Day 213’s song title is informed by an Amazing Grace lyric: “the days dissolve like snow” (full log) —

Day 219: “trial run of the kaleidoscope shuttle” (full log) —

Secret Chords / Hidden Rhythms

I’m trying something unprecedented.

There’s a wing of music I’m keeping away from public ears, because it is novel and exciting enough to be a trade top-secret.

It is a perspective on piano-playing, combining ideas that I have never heard combined before.

After a few years of diving into these combinations, simple truths have revealed themselves — so crystalline, so obvious — that I’ve a hunch that the idea will spread.

I believe that for most inventions and discoveries, being first is not terribly important. But in rare cases, it is.

This is one. Certainly I’ve never found anything else that appears to warrant such careful treatment — to warrant not publicizing it before it’s baked and ready for serving.

But instead of keeping the music fully private until the recordings debut to the world, I want to share these ideas with the Campfire Sparks readership. (There are many reasons for this too — the main one being that it’s important for the music itself.)

You, treasured reader, have a front row seat to a brand-new development in piano.

Without further ado:

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Multi-colored tufts of smoke mingle in mid-air — clouds of curlicues — some from roasted spice popcorn a few carts ahead, others the lingering ghosts of fireworks launched towards the statues of Helios and Perse looming off the neighboring volcano, as tradition calls for.

It’s loud even with your ears covered: the crowds are excited, dramatic cheering erupts the moment the sun debuts this wintry morning, and everyone wants a cookie.

Decorated as a golden disco ball, your oven *dings*, summoning a swarm immediately, mostly children, craning their necks to see how you’ll do it.

[ Take off your warming earmuffs to distribute your delicious delicacies in a more engaged manner ] —

The road is wide, with enough berth for two parade lines. A marching band overtakes your float. Behind the drumline it’s acrobats tumbling, jugglers covered in lights, and another band approaching — this next one heralded by blue-feathered batons pirouetting through the sky. Your procession is the slower-moving, this side of the street chosen, wisely, by the peckish contingent.

You open the disco ball while leaning away from the heat-cloud expelled: out slides a five-level tray stacked full of butter biscuits. While news of the aroma fans out across the audience as if along lines of dominoes expertly coordinated, you dip two cookies into a vat of simmering chocolate, in one swift motion laying them both gracefully next to your trusty assistant.

She steps off her perch, waits for the chocolate to cool just enough, and begins to peck out a poem of her choosing.

Lauriel’s the true star of this show. Her beak clasps around the first finished cookie —hot off the Poet Parrot printing press — passing it to you to hand out, in order that she may commence her next creation.

You place the cookie on your palm and offer it to the closest child. Before he grabs it you’re able to read the top-side, perforated:

Joy is not made to be a crumb.

// Side B //

Thank you for tuning in! You were listening to two studio clips concatenated: one from July ’09, the other March ’16. The photograph was taken in Croatia at Plitvice Lakes National Park, a wondrous reserve with mysterious bat-filled caves tucked off to the side.

When we visited, we unwittingly stayed past closing, only realizing later we were the only humans left — sharing this gorgeous expanse with melodious insects, the iridescent stars, surrounded on all sides by lake waters burbling in endless effervescence.

The poem excerpt pecked out by Lauriel the Parrot is the last line of Mary Oliver’s “Don’t Hesitate” —

Open-Air Studio

I’ve begun taking Monsieur Magpie out to the local airfield-turned-park and could not be happier with how it’s going. Here he is next to Head Honcho. 69 keys/60 kilos.

Some frame repair1, voicing of the pickups2 — he’s got pickups! — and sanding + needling of the hammers3 later . . .

. . . and into the wheeled trolley he goes — 30 minutes later, hooked up with a front-row seat overlooking the eventual sunset:

My mission is not busking or street-performance (which focus on collecting donations and pleasing crowds). Though I do hope people enjoy the music, for the music is given in the spirit of The Gift, I have two other goals instead:

1. To get comfortable playing an unfamiliar and new improvisational style — no matter how chaotic or distracting my surroundings — and

2. To showcase a different type of public art, one that prioritizes the possibility of evoking curiosity and wonder.

Towards point #2, I’m swapping the “hat” or “instrument case” out, for printed concert programs instead, to frame each outing as an invitation rather than exhortation. And in addition, setting up a “lounge area” for visitors to hang out on bright area rugs, sign a travelers’ log, maybe pour themselves a cup of tea . . .

Though the goal is music-first and audience-second, I am ecstatic to report that audience interactions have so far been lovely, filled with surprises and joy.

If you wish to attend live in Berlin — or any upcoming live-streams from anywhere — join the instagram channel4 to be notified. I’d love to see you!

🏖️

Over the next 3 months, I’ll roll Mr. Magpie on public adventures, to prepare to record The Tributary in-studio. Because: after playing two private concerts with Tributary material, I learned that I wasn’t able to fully enter the space of free creation, which the music needs absolutely.

The Tributary is an approach to piano improvisation that I’ve never heard before. Genre-wise it’s closest to jazz, but it isn’t. This set of mini-dialects expands a core language that I am simultaneously discovering and learning how to speak more fluently. Since it’s nearly all improvisational, it requires familiarity with a process of action; but since there are no piano recordings for me to reference, I cannot yet speak it in dialogue with other musicians (except in brief encounters where I introduce someone to it, one person at a time . . . more about this in the future also).

Which brings us to The Secret. Last issue, I announced that this issue (No. 20) will introduce a paid section to Campfire Sparks, and the following issue (No. 21) will reveal the music and why everything is so hush-hush.

The plan is intact.

But at the bottom of this issue, for paid subscribers, I’ll show a brief teaser of what the in-progress Tributary sounds like.

Fun Tips That Are Also Hot*

The latest entry is a curious blend of peaceful and playful: Turnings.

This low-key-high-octane ROSALÍA track is getting queued up a lot at my precise geo-coordinates lately:

I’ve filled another notebook and it’s onto the next Archer & Olive. So many cherries: two cloth bookmarks, thick pages, ideal footprint & hand, paper pouch in back, carefree elastic pen holder, and the venerable dot-grid (still inexplicably a rare occurrence across the wider notebook landscape . . . I mean how oppressive, obtuse, and ugly is lined paper?).

Like a track on repeat, I find myself coming back to this photo by Guy Bourdin (1979), and wonder how much its enchantment is enhanced by my fascination with the film Last Year at Marienbad (1961) —

Proof of Play quadruplet

Day 199, “rose petal umbrella over a field mouse wedding” (full log) —

Day 201, “from soil to sky” (full log) —

Day 207, “the fog lifts over circe’s menagerie” (full log) —

The Tributary: Windfinding

It’s been odd, publishing music steadily, especially to “show what I’m working on” — while what I’m working on calls for strict secrecy. A bit like welcoming you into a design studio, where fully 70% of the gadgets and signage are draped under white cloth.

With the introduction of a paid tier, kindly imagine with me — with all the attendant pomp and circumstance — us, standing in the same room, as a team of assistants lifts the collection of white cloths up in the air, revealing . . .

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Your quick reflexes glance upward to double-check the letter’s origins, well before the postmark dries.

There’s only cloudless sky, one desert’s edge to another.

The twin horizons face off quietly, like sentinel guards before a palace. You can nonetheless imagine them chuckling to each other across the tundra, frequencies of telepathic mischief whizzing over your head.

You unfold your wallet of origami dragonfliers and slide one out from its loop holster. Rolled up, they’re each smaller than a cigarette, but the para-dimensional sniffer is the slimmest of all.

[ Launch your para-dimensional dragonflier into the air, to investigate the source of the wayward water droplet ] —

Music notes start to sound. (Preparation for dimensional portaling.)

Four paper wings separate from the paper thorax and stretch outward. Seconds later, there’s enough space for the dragonfly body to expand, too. You watch them unfurl along microscopic creases in coordinated ballet. When the origami ends its last stage of growth — its wingspan now the length of your arm — it begins to fly.

The sniffer arcs a circle around you at shoulder height. It accelerates into a blur — continuously silent, although you can feel the telltale displacement of air against your skin as a miniature vortex is summoned.

Compared to the near-future and lingering-spirit sniffers, your para-dimensional dragonflier usually generates more music than light — its soundtrack a necessary artifact of its real-time perusal of nearby parallel dimensions — though you can imagine the picture from above. There’s you standing at the center, surrounded by the halo-glow rings of your early-model flier, whirring ever faster, hurtling into the inevitable bending of space-time.

The dirt of the desert, now deep-orange from the set sun, begins to dance.

Suddenly, the origami flier winks out of your current temporality, leaving you motionless in the cooled evening air.

// Side B //

Thanks for tuning in — you’ve been listening to an excerpt from April 22nd’s studio time. Track 3 was a 27-minute improvisation session meandering around a weedy field of ideas. (The photo was taken under a transmission tower, after a gig in the Catskills.)

I don’t recall how it felt this time, but free-creation piano-playing that jumps from one thread to another, without settling into anything, often feels bad in the moment. The alternative — the flow of finding a space, through diving deep into one pool, can be so enveloping that experiencing it (and the rewards of it: usually a refined theme or song) spoils other modes of creation, including the “sampler platter” situation that you hear in this clip.

Listening back, I gather it’s not the worst predicament. The second-guessings are simply judgments barging into the present, remixing an organic process — and anyway, I adore the sampler-platter approach to travel, food, life . . . so why not composition too? The intention is always the same anyway: spiritual peace.

April 22 Track 3 raises another issue.

I cut this excerpt at 7.5 minutes because, soon after that bookmark, I began referencing approaches to music that I’ve been keeping secret. Even the “why is it a secret?” is a secret — for a while yet!

But, dear reader, I’m on a mission to let you in on the secret first. Here’s the plan:

Jul 29 (Issue #20 of Campfire Sparks is published)

• Paid subscriptions begin
• Subsequent issues of Campfire Sparks drop every 2 weeks

Aug 12 (Issue 21)

• The Secret is shared with paid subscribers, along with the music it guards

Aug 26 — Oct 7 (Issues 22 to 25)

• Travel Poems . Chapter 3 . There is no path back releases on Oct 6 and will be sent to paid subscribers for free
• Paid subscribers can also redeem Chapter 1 . Secret towns and Chapter 2 . The night sea for free

Between Oct 8 and 16, I’ll record the next album The Tributary in studio, after a few months of workshopping it outdoors, among the city public, using a conceptual-busking setup. (More on that below.)

After The Tributary is mixed, mastered, and released — likely Spring 2025 — free subscribers will learn The Secret as well.

The Tributary is the culmination of what I’ve been working towards for 12 years, most of that time unaware I was doing it.

Paid subscribers will also receive The Tributary album for free upon release, in gratitude of your immense and meaningful support 🌊

On top of 4 free albums and 6+ months of private access, I’ll announce other gifts for paid subscribers: beautiful objects, festive events, quirky peculiarities.

(Free subscribers will still receive issues of the current newsletter + more frequently.)

I’ll launch the paid tier in two weeks — but you can already join it by pledging a subscription now. Everyone pledged before July 29th receives honorary golden ticket access, which means I send you all my future releases in perpetuity for free also! Here’s what a physical golden ticket looks like — they’re only available at live shows for $60 each1:

Subscribe now

Recommendations Out the Horn

Some cool recent discoveries — hope you like them too.

1. This loving, tremendous documentary on Roy Hargrove (103 mins) — even just the first minute is fantastic. I wasn’t close to Roy but I miss him tenderly. Is there any other heavyweight who gave anywhere near his presence, generosity, and heart on the NYC and global jazz scene? The prophet in his own words and music:

2. On keeping up with self-multiplying projects: I was this-week-years-old when I learned how to batch tasks properly. It’s Day 3 of leveling up from “to-do lists” — and reclaiming energy feels like a superpower. Thank you to writer Nicolas Cole for this youtube video —

   

3. I have re-ordered the universe — and so can you!
   
   For real, my way of seeing the world has shifted permanently, under a simple idea I’ve always known to be true, but couldn’t articulate clearly:
   
   Nothing is real except love.
   
   Last month, I listened to Marianne Williamson & Rick Rubin in conversation, immediately ordered her book A Return to Love, which led me to immediately buy a copy of A Course in Miracles, the source Williamson’s book and teachings are based on.
   
   The realness of love and nothing-else-if-it-doesn’t-come-from-love, has mind-bending, radical implications for living life, and even metaphysics and science, certainly music, art, and The Gift. (To me the choice is dead-ass obvious, of how seriously to take this subject and its implications.) We all know that love follows an upside-down physics — the more you give, the more is created, the more there exists, the more you have, for starters — and I wonder what happens if we treat that as the right-side-up physics, with everything else as the anomaly.
   
   I feel I’ve found The Source — and will be sharing how it’s changed my way of seeing . . . plus how I’ve started to notice, even dispel, the mass hallucinations surrounding us all, every moment of every day2.
   
   Currently I’m on Lesson #11 (of 365 total) from the Course in Miracles workbook. I find the urtext of Miracles difficult to access — props to Marianne Williamson for her study and distillation of it into A Return to Love 🍀 — but its companion workbook is plum-perfect so far, even just as food for thought. All A Course in Miracles materials are available for free online at acim.org.

   

   I’ve love to discuss A Return to Love and A Course in Miracles with you — say hi if you’ve read either or would like to. Definitely let me know if you want to join me on the ACIM Workbook journey.

4. Speaking of metaphysics (and Plato in footnote 2) — hop on ’s 12-month immersive course in humanities with me and hundreds of participants among his other ardent readers. You’ll need to subscribe to Ted’s newsletter The Honest Broker for the well-rounded syllabus — plus oodles of impeccable writing across all manner of sublime subjects. To say his newsletter is worth the cost of admission is easy as a breath of spring mountain air.
   
   Ted is my pick for most insightful and interesting voice in culture today. A pair of recent interviews bookend a quick entry point if you’re unfamiliar with him or his writing: here in thoughtful dialogue with Rick Beato on music, culture, even AI; and here in wide-ranging conversation with David Perell making sense of (how to survive in) the current zeitgeist, along with fun background on Ted himself, his daily life, how he came to be called The Honest Broker:

The Open Music Studio

The doors were flung outward. Now the walls ask for dismantling too, brick by brick.

1. Last week, I opened the music studio to the public in two ways. First, my teleporter welcomed visitors inside for instant transport via music + soundscapes:

   

   This took place in the courtyard outside my studio, which was also open to the public. An endless parade of strangers passed through, plus a raft of talent I’ve been fortunate to rub elbows with — , Richard, and Andy, who dropped by at various points during the day — and whenever we played music together the room filled up with listeners.

   

   This merry Saturday originally began with a solo concert in the Open Metaverse (thank you paw!), kicking off a festival where a later act — the extraordinary Eclectic Method — sampled my show for some mashup madness . . .
   
   . . . and ended with the inaugural outing (thank you Harris!) of this new friend of the studio: a 69-key mini-piano, for another performance in the local airfield-park:

   

   Lots more about that to come, as I embark on a conceptual-busking setup. I’m taking the Open Studio out on the road — and will report findings in the next issue.

2. Last month I attended Olafur Arnalds’s OPIA Festival in the Netherlands, where I saw incredible shows (fave discoveries: Svaneborg Kardyb, The Vernon Spring, Kiasmos) — and participated in a group interview3.
   
   Since some of my Music Postcards made it into the OPIA Magazine, I ended up being asked to read the text of one of them on-air. Here’s the magazine spread of all 3, without music (also check out these postcards with music) —

   

There’s Not Enough Stuff Going On . . .

. . . to make people excited about music.

Demand continues to drop, as new conveniences come online and new entertainments clamor for our attention.

And with more music being released than ever before, we do have a music-discovery problem — how to find the music out there that’s been made just for you? — but that’s downstream from a music-excitement problem.

, who writes a captivating newsletter at the intersection of music and data, recently asked readers what they thought was the most underrated problem in music today. Some weeks later, Chris compiled 14 answers including mine, adding helpful context and a jolly good suggestion towards the end. Here’s the excerpt from his essay:

#9 We Focus Too Much on the Supply of Music Rather than the Demand for Music

Everyday there are hundreds of thousands of songs uploaded to the music streaming services of the world. That means that there is more music released in a matter of weeks than was released across decades of the 20th century. In other words, making and distributing professional quality recordings has never been easier. Because of that, tons of companies — from BandLab to Suno to Landr — have cropped up over the last decade to try to build, maintain, and monetize an infrastructure that supports an ever-growing supply of artists and songs. The problem? We aren’t investing as heavily in inducing demand for those artists and songs. Here’s what Eric Pan recently wrote to me about this:

Next to zero effort is being put into growing the demand side of music, despite overflowing riches. There is wonderful, novel, era-defining music being made, but no support systems to surface it and to present audiences with events and experiences — big and small, magnificent to intimate to wacky to mysterious — that create wonder and communicate the majesty/fun of music even a few footsteps [from home].

For each fête de la musique or piano day in New York City, there could be hundred other days, a hundred thousand shows held in buildings just sitting around, a hundred million new listeners curious to check out which up-and-coming local acts are playing at the local park this week. That’s just one thread of possibility extrapolated along one known pathway, before anyone gets creative!

Growing the number of artists ad infinitum will be a fruitless endeavor if we cannot also grow the demand for those artists. Part of this growth should be focused on events. But another part of it should be focused on fostering a love for music in our schools rather than demoting it to an extracurricular.

(The whole list is great, as are Chris’s insights — I especially resonate with #7 and #10.)

In addition to a renewed focus on music in our educational systems, I believe much more can be done. It is up to artists and independent financiers to channel their imaginations into reality, to assist in achieving escape velocity from our monolithic culture photocopier-machine (I speak of our beloved Disneys, Clear Channels, etc.).

What kind of creative solutions? The largest lever for change is Live Happenings. In a world ruled by online scrolling, it takes less effort for artists to offer a hint of halcyon days, when entertainment and socializing were synonymous with live music. So — simply performing more is superb, already. I’ll also offer a starting brainstorm for going further:

• Make concerts surprising. Put the bassist up in a treehouse in the middle of the audience. Borrow ideas from theater and circus. All that attention put into the back screen behind the performers? Expand it to the entire venue, the choice of venue, especially locations not usually considered music venues. (You’ll quickly filter for the passionate sound engineers out there.) Connection always comes first, storytelling is the vehicle, and your ingenuity is limitless — so unleash what enhances your music and deepens your relationship with your visitors.

• Delight listeners. Everyone craves personal attention. An artist can’t spend all of their energy on that, so this changes based on how many fans they have . . . but as a function of creativity vastly more than of numbers. Fred again.. is a beacon for inspirational artist-fan relationships at scale; you can read all about his approaches, broken down, in issue 33 of Rob Abelow’s newsletter.

• Bring music to the people. Play in the streets, at the park, do interesting things with that. Set design, conceptual framing, or both. Initiating a gesture from a place of personal meaning catapults it beyond gimmick, into a multiplier on whatever you perform.
  
  If you’re playing a gig for a hundred-fifty at a club, it’s worth seeing how to make more (and reach more) outdoors. If you’re drawing larger crowds, invite them to a pop-up somewhere fun and serve popcorn. Who didn’t want to go to a barbecue hosted by an unknown band called The Roots? Peep Alice Phoebe Lou’s playbook — she started that way and still does it today. Two words: house concerts.

• Collaborate with artists across disciplines. Everything can be soundtracked: a book, a dessert, a knitted scarf — go nuts. With any artists doing public things, propose an intriguing live addition to their repertoire, whether it’s book signings, flea market stall takeovers, fashion runway shows literally anywhere, scavenger hunts around the museum district that segue into traveling musical caravans headed downtown.
  
  Planning a show? Same deal: talk to artists you admire and welcome their myriad, life-giving talents on board. I love music, but I love endless wonder even more.

Ok, but, where to find the time and resources to do any of this stuff?

The ideas come first: they start small and low-cost. For our release show for Travel Poems . Chapter 2 . The night sea, we asked a neighborhood art gallery to host, in exchange for proceeds from the bar going to them. Admission at 10 bucks per person went to us musicians, our wonderful sound guy, and our door person. A photographer and a painter showed their work, some of which sold — we didn’t profit from their sales, but they brought people and vibes! Visitors could assemble a free farolito from a tea-light candle to bring into the venue — more vibes — costing us 10 cents each.

Remember: these don’t address “how do I build as an artist?” but rather “how do I help build audience demand for music?” The first question is still challenging — but made easier with care put into the second.

Make people curious; reconnect them to magic.

The other part of the puzzle is still financiers. Since I am not yet one of them, I can only skip up to Salzburg and yodel for help. We need individuals, institutions, and governments to fund these types of things, especially when visions expand — but it’s clear that the more inventiveness we invest into the musical experience, through both action and ambition, the more momentum is generated.

If we’re asking for a revolution, the revolution begins with us.

On Encores Unprompted

This issue I’m limiting the Proof of Play round-up to 3 recent entries4:

That’s from Day 194 — full report — “guava trees in sunlight”.

And here’s “effortless cool on hostile territory” — full report — from Day 192:

Day 163 — full report — “nova scotia outpost”:

Happy bathing in mystery!

🐢

Kelp-like tubes of massive sunroots form a suspension system — dangling off rocky cliffs jutting vertical. Somehow, their pulpy braids anchor into smooth stone in a way your fingers and feet won’t grapple.

A thicket of netting offers straphangers and stirrups, step after step: a tunnel for clambering through with ease. The heavy strands barely move in response to your commotion, but sections of scaffold sway on ocean breezes that corkscrew their way up the mountainside.

One kilometer up from the sea isn’t how you envisioned this day to go.

[ On second thought, today’s peculiar alarm-clock tune may have foreshadowed this precise moment ] —

A teal dragonfly swerves past your ear in a quick whooom.

You turn your head to follow its flight path:

. . . up — past an accessible ledge covered in the baby sprouts of sunroots — toward fast-moving clouds above.

Is there really a castle on this island? You’ll spot it better from higher elevation, or maybe it’s right above you.

// Side B //

Thank you for tuning in! The music for this issue features a crossfade of two clips:

• piano solo excerpt from 2022 03 26, clip 25, 0:51 to 4:15
• piano solo excerpt from 2022 09 29, clip 1, 4:38 to 7:39

. . . both jazz standards, based on reader curiosity1. Does anyone recognize the two tunes explored here?

Travel Poems . Chapter 3 . There is no path back

The Travel Poems trilogy is complete! At September’s end, the album Chapter 3 . There is no path back releases not only with a concert with band and surprise guest musicians — but also, an exhibition with 5 artists across multi-sensory artforms over a weeklong residency.

More announcements to come about the grand event. Travel Poems has been my artist debut (Chapter 1 came out in 2020; “you, too, can escape quarantine immediately!”) and it’s a true labor of love, in tribute to things I treasure: taking audiences on imagination-adventures through music, soundscapes, live storytelling, and on and on.

This newsletter wouldn’t exist without the portal opened by Travel Poems.

If you haven’t yet heard the jazz & found-sound journeys of Travel Poems, I’d love to introduce them to you. Here are links to Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 for streaming and Bandcamp digital + CD (handpainted covers!) purchases — with many discount options for Campfire Sparks readers:

1. Pledge a paid subscription here and receive the trilogy for free

2. Pre-order Travel Poems . Chapter 3 . There is no path back and be sent the album now, far in advance of the release (shh!)

3. Use coupon “bonfire” on any Bandcamp purchase for 50% off, good until June 1

4. If you can’t afford to purchase but would like a copy, reply to this email and I’ll hook you up!

Your support and listenership means everything 💛🌖

I can’t think of anything cooler than making something together with people I admire

Imagine holding in your hands an orange cassette tape brimming with catchy songs, pop art, and a cheeky zine with liner notes 🍊

The intrepid Ryan Stubbs has, once again, gathered the formidable talents of Substack movers and shakers — this time into a physical, 3D, hurts you if it bounces off your skull, object.

But there’s no need to be (only) a cave-dweller about it. Pop the tape into your nearest boombox or walkman.

This marvelous mixtape emits enigmatic emissaries all upon the press of one physical button! Culminating fully three episodes of Ryan’s hit TV show SALON DU MONDE, FREMONT, it’s as if the joint soundtrack gathered enough electro-plasma to escape the confines of screens the world over, leaping into reality, a force-blob unable to be contained:

Washed Memoir in Real Time

SALON DU MONDE, FREMONT: THE SOUNDTRACK

Your wildest dreams have come true. Now available exclusively via the Metalabel platform: A physical cassette and digital release from artists featured on the Substack-based television show Salon Du Monde, Fremont. Have you ever tried doing something for which you were totally ill-equipped but you…

Read more

2 years ago · 23 likes · 2 comments · Miter

Pick up a copy of the Salon Du Monde, Fremont soundtrack today (ships in June), and peep this extraordinary cast of co-conspirators:

Cohort One and Done

The 1st cohort of Piano Liberation Workshop is a wrap! This majestic adventure taught me oodles of lessons about running a group class, especially how to tailor the unlimited subject of piano improvisation to all levels and musical styles, all at once.

Looking back on the topics covered, I’m happy with our focus on the body as a grounding tool — through dance, through the voice — which reflects how I like to teach one-on-one . . . and I’m brimming with ideas how to further refine the syllabus.

The topics we covered over 10 classes:

The next cohort begins Fall 2024. Sign up for the Piano Liberation waitlist if you’re interested — all levels of expertise welcome!

Every Day I Sing the Dues

My daily publishing of music + photography presses on undaunted. Here are some of my favorites since last issue’s round-up. Apr 19’s “knee-deep in the sea currents” —

Day 115’s “never the same hour”2 —

Day 116’s “one trillion waves vibrating in concert”3 —

Day 123’s “the sweep, and grandeur, of you”4 —

The next step for Proof of Play is making an online “open studio” space where they can be viewed as a collection, browsed easily, heard and sampled, etc. For now, feel free to check out the youtube playlist where I’m a month behind daily uploads, gradually catching up, the clockwork of round pebbles dropped into an infinity pool.

Have a lovely week!

🎆

It’s not often that the moon rests right in front of you, as though tied to a bamboo pole, extended from your rucksack, dangled on fishing wire.

Even more curious: tonight she’s perfectly halved — the finale of a magician’s Act II.

The air smells sweet of wildgrass. Evening has just fallen, and the day’s warmth still pools in pockets — insects buzzing, preparing now for the next scene. They’ll need to work in concert to rope the heavy curtain of night across the stage’s expanse.

Your steps echo in your own ears. Boots atop gravel: crunchety crunch.

[ Pause for a spell, listen to the twilight ] —

A mysterious tune reaches out to you from somewhere across the valley meadow, unmistakably as the smell of fresh-baked sourdough.

Tracking it down would mean tacking to your left, away from the path, into the shadows of overgrown bramble. Secrets kept from moonlight, whispered between trees, alive and fallen.

Fortunately — the night is infinite.

// Side B //

Thank you for tuning in . . . you’ve been listening to Sunday’s morning composition, scored with revelry from a Johannesburg garden1. If you’d like to hear the whole 34-min recording — a meandering goat trail of pentuplets — leave a comment and I’ll send it over to you express by knapsack 🎒.

(The usual term’s “quintuplets” but how could I resist punning pent-up with this impromptu drop of a favorite Sonny Rollins song?)

The timeline accelerates; why not us too?

Spring is here! Those of us intent on remaining curmudgeonly are forced to decide: grouse over joys we never asked for, or replace the charade with cherry blossoms?

After 82 days of daily publication of the composition process, Proof of Play is now ready to be transported from water to soil. I’ve sufficiently proved to myself that — even on days I’m spent; no matter what others might think — I am now able to let myself out.

The question has shifted to:

How can I welcome people in?

I’ve always adored the promise and the visitor’s experience of the Open Studio. Oh, to be a painter in a barn of sawhorses and utility belts encrusted with the dried fruits of canvases constantly repurposed! Surely the highlight of such a life would be those summer weekends, shared with passersby breaking stride to inquire Ah, but what’s this about your process . . . ?

2 days into “writing” morning pages via voice recording — less Dale Cooper, more just . . . guy probably? muttering about donuts — and I’m smitten with touring the local park near my house, in particular a neglected patch full of lichen and weeds that I’ve nicknamed “Scotland”.

Lichen-Scotland was the ideal grounds for stomping around in brainstorms, after being struck by the idea, not unlike a dusting of powdered sugar — that a music-maker ought to be able to offer some form of ongoing, compelling Open Studio experience.

I know it can be done. But my ideas are seedlings and I could use some help —

So, what would you like to peruse in a hypothetical musician’s Open Studio, if there were the means to access the insides of their brain? More tangibly: what curiosities atop a workbench or dangling from pulleys might prompt you to wonder, “Is there a story behind this?”

meanwhile . . .

If anyone’s in Berlin (Germany) on April 23, my music photo-roman Foot of the Carpathians will be screened at Sputnik Kino (tix) — stream it here and now, of course, but know that the showcase will be somewhat of an event!

This moody jazz-trio number is from Travel Poems . Chapter 1 . Secret towns. The video features original writing, and original photography from the Carpathian Mountains area, ending up a full-circle contemplation of dreams, memory, and the feeling of home. The piece offers tribute to Chris Marker’s groundbreaking short photo-roman La Jetée — a hearty must-view recommendation if you haven’t seen.

For anyone who’s curious, here’s the original press announcement of “Foot of the Carpathians”, my very first single as a solo artist. It’s a fun one to play live: always very different due to its wide-open song structure.

my socrates note

There is exclusive music for you, treasured reader . . . and quite the tale to tell about it

A section of the vault, hidden on an unnumbered floor the elevators have been programmed to whisk past unawares, shall be opened soon — and to you first.

Why the high security, the subterfuge? 🤔

Every few weeks I think about Socrates wondering on his deathbed if he should have pursued music. Then I re-remember his description of philosophy as the “noblest and best of music” and I’m triply flabbergasted.

the land where notes drift off to

I am thrilled by how Piano Liberation Workshop #1 (last issue’s announcement) has been sea-faring. First, we sold-out 10 seats for the 5-week course; and what’s even better: the improvisations sent in by students are FUN — and far more exciting + imaginative than what you’d normally hear in a music-learning class.

Could not be prouder of these students! 🍰

You stand at a bus stop, sheltered from sky by an oversized fiberglass wing, impressively contoured with the likeness of a falcon’s plumage. The bird of prey looks friendly but disheveled, its wings a faded green-blue, its cartoonish body perched roadside here for probably . . . decades?

Below the other wing: stacked pyramids of tree trunks, cut into cinnamon-roll cross-sections, possibly for firewood.

You try fishing out a map-and-schedule from your soaked backpack. The folded paper falls apart in clumps.

Suddenly, your peripheral vision signals: you’re not alone.

[ Look up from your hands, covered in pebbles of multicolored pulp ] —

A porcupine walks gaily down the street, left to right, on a promenade of no hurry.

Sans umbrella!

In fact, its strut belies royal heritage: this fashion-runway stroll features glistening, iridescent quills, waving elegantly with each step, even as the porcupine putters on tiny — no doubt velvet-padded — paws.

Omnidirectional spikes jutting from its body ensure zero interference as The Emperor approaches you, then passes on towards the pile of logs — searching and sniffing.

// Side B //

So happy you’ve tuned in! That song was “the peregrine and the porcupine”1, excerpted from 20 June 2022’s morning composition and titled today, for this issue2.

It’s been seventy-one immense days of the year so far — I have two epic announcements queued up for you. But hold up, one moment: I’m humming and spinning like a gyroscope in gratitude, for your readership + listenership . . . so first, I want to say thank you for being here, and I’d love to hear what you’re noticing, getting up to, and feeling excited about lately.

Let me know in the comments or in a reply to this issue via email — I’m excited to hear from you!

Piano Liberation Workshop — All Aboard!

Ten years into teaching jazz piano privately, I’m inviting you to join me for a thrilling new chapter. Are you interested in improvising on the piano or keyboard? I’d love to introduce you to the most fun (and simplest) path that I’ve found.

I believe exploring the piano should be as intuitive as when we were given crayons and paints as kids.

The Piano Liberation Workshop is cohort-based course, open online to the public in small groups at a time. It’s for . . .

• total beginners who’ve never played an instrument

• intermediate players exploring new ways to create

• classical musicians who want to develop impro + groove

• music-lovers who once took lessons, then stopped (that was me 🙋🏻‍♂️)

• unsure if you’d fit? head to PianoLiberation.com or send a message 📮

The first five-week course takes place in April, with our first intro meeting on Wednesday, March 27th.

If you’d like to know all the details — pricing, teaching credentials, my exact plan to tailor the workshop to your needs — visit PianoLiberation.com. Your questions might be answered there; if they’re not, I’m just an email or substack-chat away.

Proof of Play

Today marks the grand opening of a new project — it’s my 🍩 Theory of Everything Bagel 🥯, so crazy it just might “work” — called Proof of Play. Every day (!) I’m posting a clip of music from the studio, plus a photograph that I took On This Day in the current or previous year, plus notes on my writing time (music and words), and . . . soon I’ll pack in a few more ingredients too, to expand the scope of the project into a well-rounded package with a bow wrapped around just-so.

Why do this?

Readers of these behind-the-scenes Side Bs might know that I’ve wondered incessantly about what to do with the music composed near-daily. The same question has grown louder for photos I’ve taken, and words written, too.

Simultaneous to these inquiries: each week I believe more strongly that the process is the art more than the art is the art. In other words, what if what we think of as art — the end result, the painting or album or movie — is more a byproduct of all the art where it truly happens: all the elbow grease, all the decisions made, all the insights unveiled?

When it comes to music, the way that a song changes its essential character, over different performances, clarifies for me the idea that art is the process of making it.

This is especially true for highly improvised music.

And even more, if one’s intent is to create an improvisatory language — which is what’s happening for my next album, The Tributary . . . which, in turn, presents its own challenge: “Um, how do I make the album show the language?”

(I guess speaking it makes more sense than describing the grammar.)

Though today’s the ribbon-cutting for Proof of Play, I’ve already been doing it (publishing a daily photo scored with music) for 12 days, and I’ve already been describing “the words and music I’ve been writing” for 51 days.

I needed to try it for a while, to know that I could keep it up sustainably. Indeed, it started without any plan: the writer Dickie Bush began publishing a log of his daily writing since the new year, inspiring me to ponder: what the heck, I’ll give that a shot, and log music too. Three days in, I began seeing how it could unify my efforts to:

1. show process,

2. show myself in a way that doesn’t interfere with creation or sprout expectations (i.e., mostly stuff I’m already doing),

3. practice publishing more effectively, reduce perfectionism, etc., and

4. combine my loves for creating music, photos, and words.

Why — that’s more evidence that art is process!

The journey of daily publication has weathered hardship. I spent the month of February in South Africa on-the-road, and though it was already difficult to journal each day, keeping up with composition each day was the thorniest. Yamaha Reface CPs are fine travel keyboards, but zero-music days proved unavoidable. On the 17th, I posted my only double-zero (so far) —

Day 48 log: What I played + wrote today — Sat, 17 Feb 2024

Total studio time: 0 hours words + 0 hours music

First day of zeroes across the board! The day would come, to not be able to make studio time at all — I feared it, then saw its inevitable arrival, then found how to embrace the challenge of its existence.

I went from resenting the idea of breaking the streak I’d worked to build, to contemplating extreme measures to make time and post the log — this would have involved a lengthy trek into civilization, leaving the company of people I’d traveled across the world to see — to clarifying a more wholesome ordering of priorities for myself.

What I realized: being scared of hiccups, interruptions, or . . . living . . . isn’t a good heuristic for making choices.

. . .

In the end, I’m happy to surface this “failure” — it’s part of the voyage.

There’s lots more to say about Proof of Play, and constant puzzles to puzzle — for instance, where and how to publish the entries? You, treasured reader, deserve front-row access to whatever I’m up to — in particular, a privileged seat relative to the instagrams and twitters of the world — so ideally they go on substack first.

But I don’t envision publishing Campfire Sparks daily. So the happy medium for now is probably a recap of the entries from the previous week, at the bottom of each issue . . . like the current Issue 16.

one more thing . . .

I’m mulling ways for you to vote for entries that you like + you’d like me to develop further, record and put on an album, and other possibilities. The idea: if clips go on to do something — make it onto a record, get synced to a short film, etc. — all of its supporters receive credit and monetary royalties, if there are any, in return.

Above are Proof of Play music postcards March 4–10; you can check out the four days prior to those on youtube, where I’ve just started catch-up broadcasting.

(I believe the term of art process for that is “reruns”.)

Comment with your thoughts — and catch me up on what you’re up to also 💌

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• live your best life; we’re all connected anyway 🏴‍☠️

Thank you.